Hoos Hoping to Get Right on Road

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Back-to-back road games are next on the schedule for the University of Virginia women’s basketball team. The Cavaliers love playing at John Paul Jones Arena, but a change of scenery might do them well. Two of UVA’s three ACC victories, after all, have come on the road, and its recent homestand resulted in a pair of frustrating losses.

In each game the Wahoos started slowly and fell behind by a sizable margin.

“You can’t win games against great teams like that,” UVA head coach Amaka Agugua-Hamilton said Sunday afternoon at JPJ.

Against No. 18 Georgia Tech, the Hoos trailed by 20 points in the first half Thursday night. Virginia rallied and cut its deficit to two in the fourth quarter, but the Yellow Jackets pulled away for a 75-62 victory.

The Sunday matinee at JPJ followed a similar script. The Louisville Cardinals raced out to a 13-4 advantage and led by 15 at the half. The Hoos lost more ground in the third quarter, after which Louisville led by 17, but they put together a stirring comeback in the fourth.

With 3:28 to play, the Cards went up 68-63. They wouldn’t score again. A baseline jumper by guard Kymora Johnson made it 68-65 with 3:02 remaining, and all the momentum was on the Cavaliers’ side. But they never caught the Cards.

Virginia turned the ball over twice in the final two minutes. Then, after calling a timeout with 19.1 seconds left, the Cavaliers had to call another one with 4.6 seconds left when the play broke down. Neither possession produced a quality shot, and Louisville escaped with a 68-65 win.

The Cavaliers fell to 11-10 overall and 3-6 in ACC play. Agugua-Hamilton, who’s in her third season at UVA, said she was disappointed in her team’s second straight slow start but also its “togetherness,” or lack thereof.

“We weren’t on one accord,” she said. “We didn’t really have five people cohesively together on the court at the same time playing.”

In ACC play, the Cavaliers have been outrebounded by an average of 5.1 boards per game, and they’re giving up an average of 13.9 offensive rebounds per game. Louisville grabbed 20 offensive boards and outrebounded Virginia 43-31 overall.

“And that’s big,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “We didn’t execute yet again at the end of the game. That’s big. But I think it’s the whole 40 minutes at this point. The last two games, we just were not on one accord.”

Virginia celebrated National Girls & Women in Sports Day on Sunday, and the atmosphere at JPJ was festive. Recognized at halftime in a video on Hoo Vision were the current and former women from UVA who competed at the Olympic Games and Paralympics last summer. Six of them attended the game: swimmers Emma Weber (U.S.), Alex Walsh (U.S.) and Aimee Canny (South Africa), pole-vaulter Bridget Guy Williams (U.S.), rower Sky Dahl (U.S.) and discus-thrower Ashley Anumba (Nigeria).

Also in attendance at JPJ were former UVA women’s basketball players whose respective college careers spanned more than a half-century, along with former head coach Debbie Ryan. This was alumni weekend for the program, and the current team had a meet-and-greet session with alumni at practice Saturday.

“It means a lot,” said Johnson, a sophomore from Charlottesville. “It’s inspiring to have people come back and give to us and also just know that people believe in this program, and I hope to be one of them one day: able to come back and give to the people I meet.”

The current Cavaliers wanted to honor their predecessors with a victory Sunday. Instead, they experienced more frustration.

Virginia, which is averaging 16.4 turnovers per game in ACC play, finished with 15 against Louisville (14-6, 7-2). More costly was the Cavaliers’ inaccurate outside shooting. They made only 1 of 14 shots from 3-point range. Sophomore guard Olivia McGhee had the Hoos’ lone trey.

Even so, UVA had a chance to force overtime.

“I think there were a lot of things that we could have done better in that game,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “Obviously, sometimes the ball doesn’t fall …  and so what can we control?

“We can control our togetherness, our energy, our effort, our rebounding, execution, setting and using screens, things like that. When we battled back, we looked good. We looked locked in. We were getting stops, we were scoring. There were some big shots there, and that’s what I always tell our players: You’re never gonna play a perfect game.”

Agugua-Hamilton pointed to a sequence early in the fourth quarter. After putting up an off-balance shot that missed, UVA guard Paris Clark stole the ball in the backcourt and dribbled in for a layup on which she was fouled.

“So it’s about playing through that adversity and it’s about the next-play mentality,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “So we’ve had it, we’ve shown it multiple times this season, but we just need to do it on a consistent basis and be able to close out games.”

Clark, a 5-foot-8 junior, scored a career-high 19 points Sunday and also led the Hoos in rebounds (seven), blocked shots (three) and steals (three). She credited the extra work she’s been putting in, “but I was really just trying to win,” Clark said.

Early foul trouble limited Latasha Lattimore’s playing time, but the 6-foot-4 redshirt junior still finished with 15 points and five rebounds, and Johnson added 12 points and eight assists.

Both played leading roles in the Cavaliers’ fourth-quarter comeback. Lattimore scored eight points and Johnson six in the final period.

Heading into the fourth quarter, Johnson said, Virginia’s objective was to “fight and play defense and rebound. Those are the three things that we were really focused on. And I thought that we did a good job containing [the Cardinals’] 3-pointers. They didn’t make a lot of 3s, if they even took them, and then we rebounded we pushed [ball up] the floor and cut the gap.”

The Cavaliers won’t play at JPJ again until Feb. 6, when they host Florida State. Virginia visits Miami (12-8, 2-7) on Thursday night and Syracuse (8-12, 2-7) on Sunday afternoon.

Her team has not practiced well recently, Agugua-Hamilton said, and that must change if the Hoos want to find success. The players who joined her at the postgame press conference Sunday agreed.

“Really, it starts in practice,” Clark said.

“We’ve got to come ready to work, put this game behind us,” Johnson said. “Obviously, we can’t worry about the losses that we’ve had recently, but we’ve just got to work, put our head down and work.”

Agugua-Hamilton said: “When we are on one accord, we play well and we beat teams. So we’ve got to figure out how to get back on the same page, we got to clean up some stuff and continue to fight.”

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