Hoos Thankful for Noyan's Return to Health

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — This has not been an easy season for Edessa Noyan. A second-year forward on the University of Virginia women’s basketball team, she came down with pneumonia last month and spent nearly a week in the hospital, thousands of miles from her family in Sweden.

Noyan missed six games before being cleared to play again. Three of those games were in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the Cavaliers went 1-2 in the Discover Puerto Rico Shootout.

“I’ve never been that sick before, so it was kind of hard,” Noyan said. “It was different because my family wasn’t here, but everybody here supported me. Everybody was always texting me when they were in Puerto Rico. And my athletic trainer”— Anthony Crescienzi—”was really supportive during the process.”

In her first game back, the 6-foot-3 Noyan played 19 minutes in Virginia’s ACC opener, a Dec. 8 loss to Boston College, and then she logged 12-plus minutes Tuesday night in a win over Maryland Eastern Shore. She totaled only five points in those games, however, and not until the Wahoos’ final non-conference game did she flash the form that earned her a starting spot coming into the season.

Noyan scored a career-best 16 points and grabbed a season-high six rebounds Saturday afternoon to help UVA hold off Coppin State 74-66 at John Paul Jones Arena.

“It felt really good,” said Noyan, who was a standout this past summer for Sweden’s Under-20 national team. “Everybody’s been so supportive of me through the whole process. I felt good in the last two practices, so then coming into this game, I had my confidence back.”

As for her fitness, “I’m almost there,” Noyan said. “My conditioning needs to get a little better, but I’m almost back fully.”

Noyan and her roommate, Latasha Lattimore, joined head coach Amaka Agugua-Hamilton at the postgame press conference Saturday.

Having Noyan back in the lineup “means a lot,” Lattimore said. “Going to Puerto Rico without her kind of just put the whole team in a little down state, but just coming back knowing that she was getting better and we were going to be able to have her back in practice [was uplifting], because she brings a lot of energy.”

Lattimore laughed. “She’s always ready to work. It doesn’t matter if it’s 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. she’s always going to come and show up for us. So just having her back, it feels really good. The energy’s there, for sure.”

With two minutes to play in the third quarter, Virginia (8-5) led by 20 and appeared headed to a one-sided victory. But Coppin State (8-6) closed the quarter on a 7-0 run and kept charging in the final period. After a 3-pointer by junior guard Paris Clark pushed the Cavaliers’ lead to 64-53 with 7:22 to play, the Eagles ran off 10 straight points.

“Give Coppin State a lot of credit, they kept their fight up,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “But I was just happy that we didn’t crumble when we hit some adversity and we were able to pull out the win.”

A pair of 3-pointers in the final two minutes helped the Hoos survive. The first, by sophomore guard Olivia McGhee, made it 69-64 with 1:55 to play. After Coppin State scored to make it a three-point game, Noyan caught a pass from sophomore point guard Kymora Johnson and calmly dropped in a shot from the top of the key to stretch Virginia’s lead to 72-66 with 58.7 seconds left.

Agugua-Hamilton, who’s in her third season at Virginia, is delighted to have Noyan back in the lineup. Noyan has attempted only 14 shots from 3-point range this season, but she’s made six of them, and she’s 8 for 8 from the line.

“E knows the system, she understands scouting reports, has a very high IQ,” Agugua-Hamilton, said, “so she’s able to help out. If somebody messes up a coverage, she always knows what she’s supposed to do … So that part of it’s great, and then also she’s talented. You can see she can play inside and out, do multiple things on offense. She had a huge 3 at the end of the game. She just affects the game in multiple ways, so it’s just been a blessing to have her back.”

The 6-foot-4 Lattimore, a transfer from Miami (Fla.), posted her second straight double-double (18 points, 10 rebounds) to lead the Cavaliers. Other standouts included Johnson (13 points, nine assists, six rebounds, two steals), Clark (nine points, seven rebounds, five assists, two steals) and McGhee (12 points).

Clark has missed five games with an ankle injury this season, and “it’s hard when you’re in and out and you get hurt and then you get back in,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “It’s just a difficult thing to do, to get in rhythm. But I thought today she looked more like herself. She was flying around on defense, she was rebounding, she had seven boards. She got to the paint and finished. Five assists, just things like that. She really is a stat-sheet stuffer, and I think we’re just going to see that more and more from her.”

Turnovers have plagued the Cavaliers this season, and they finished with 16 against Coppin State. Those were some of the lapses that allowed the Eagles back in the game.

“I think we just kind of just laid back a little bit,” Lattimore said, “and as a team we can’t really do that, because when we [play] good teams, that’s gonna be a hard hole to dig out of.”

Agugua-Hamilton said: “I thought the first half we were really good, and I thought our defense was really good. We were locked in. We talked a lot about setting the tone in this game, and every game we play at home, but particularly in this pre-Christmas game. Sometimes players can just be ready to go home for the holidays and it’s hard to set the tone. So I thought we did that, and then obviously in the third quarter we got a little bit uninterested, but we were able to come back and get the win.”

The Cavaliers don’t play again Dec. 29, when they resume ACC play with a visit to No. 3 Notre Dame.

Coming out of a stretch in which they dropped four games in a row, the Hoos have won two straight. The competition level is about to increase significantly, but Agugua-Hamilton believes her team is in a good place.

“We’re going to continue to evolve, but it’s a process,” she said. “I like where we are. I think we’re confident. We’re getting deeper. We’re getting healthier. So I think we’re moving into conference play the way you want to move in: confident.”

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