Hoos Aiming to Extend Late-Season Run

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Twenty minutes are not enough. Thirty won’t do it, either. Virginia head women’s coach Amaka Agugua-Hamilton says her basketball team must be ready to compete for the full 40 minutes every time it takes the court, especially in the postseason.

“It’s a game of runs and it’s an imperfect game,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “Nothing’s going to be perfect, so we’ve just got to compete through it all. Especially when you get into a conference tournament where tomorrow’s not promised, you need to always compete for 40 minutes.”

That buy-in was evident Sunday afternoon in Chapel Hill, N.C., where Virginia rallied from 18 points down to defeat then-No. 8 North Carolina 78-75 in the regular-season finale.

“I would hope that we don’t have to keep fighting back, digging ourselves [out of] a hole a little bit, but I just was really proud of our resilience,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “I thought we did a great job just sticking to the game plan and just staying together. We hit a lot of adversity in that game, but we had some growth moments too … So it was just really cool to see us get over that hump and be able to close out a game, and I think that’s a confidence-builder for us.”

The Cavaliers have been on the wrong side of such a comeback. In the first round of last year’s ACC tournament in Greensboro, N.C., No. 11 seed UVA led No. 14 seed Wake Forest by 15 with a minute left in the third quarter. The Demon Deacons rallied to win 58-55.

The Hoos are back at First Horizon Coliseum this week for what they hope will be a longer stay. “We’ve been trending in the right direction here lately,” Agugua-Hamilton said.

UVA won four of its final five regular-season games, including the last three, to earn the No. 10 seed in the ACC tournament. At 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Virginia (16-14) meets No. 15 seed Pitt (13-18). The winner will advance to take on No. 7 seed Cal (24-7) in the second round Thursday at 5 p.m.

This will be UVA’s second clash with Pitt in about two weeks. Led by sophomore point guard Kymora Johnson, who posted the third triple-double in program history, the Cavaliers defeated the Panthers 80-67 on Feb. 16 at the Petersen Events Center in Pittsburgh.

Johnson totaled 20 points, 11 rebounds and 11 assists, and 6-foot-4 redshirt junior Latasha Lattimore scored a career-high 30 points. Those individual highlights aside, UVA’s victory was not particularly convincing.

“We won that game, but I thought there were areas we needed to clean up, especially defensively,” Agugua-Hamilton said.

Guard Mikayla Johnson scored 27 points for Pitt that day, and center Khadija Faye contributed 24 points and 13 rebounds.

“So those things we need to clean up a little bit, but I like the way that my team is playing,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “I think we’re very confident, and I think that we’re really hard to guard when we play confident.”

For the season, three Cavaliers are averaging at least 10 points per game: Johnson (18.0 ppg), who was named first-team All-ACC Tuesday; Lattimore (14.8 ppg), who leads the team in rebounding; and junior guard Paris Clark (10.1 ppg). Edessa Noyan’s scoring average (5.8 ppg) is more modest, but the sophomore forward supplied a significant lift Sunday in Chapel Hill, matching her career high with 16 points on 6-for-11 shooting. Noyan’s four treys were a career high.

When Noyan heats up on the perimeter, “it’s huge,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “I encourage her all the time to shoot.”

Late in UVA’s 76-70 loss to Cal last month at John Paul Jones Arena, Noyan was 3 for 3 from beyond the arc, and the coaches drew up a play for her. Noyan passed up the shot, however, and “I think since then she’s been like, ‘I gotta just be able to take the shot,’ and she’s doing a great job,” Agugua-Hamilton said.

North Carolina often chose to double-team Johnson, as many UVA opponents have done this season. “And so on ball screens we just took advantage of that,” Agugua-Hamilton said.

Time and time again Johnson found Noyan open on the perimeter, and No. 8 “really helped us get over the hump and win the game,” Agugua-Hamilton said.

The Cavaliers did not start this season, their third under Agugua-Hamilton, how they expected or wanted to. In non-conference play, they lost to Oklahoma, Washington State, Wyoming and Auburn, and they dropped four straight ACC games during a stretch in January. But Agugua-Hamilton has seen her team change for the better in recent weeks, and the Hoos’ three-game winning streak in conference play is their longest of her tenure.

“I think being able to persevere through adversity has been a big thing,” Agugua-Hamilton said, “punching back when other teams punch and understanding that basketball is going to be a game of runs. They’re gonna punch, we’re gonna punch back and forth, but we want to be the last team standing. I think we changed our mentality with that a little bit.”

Two days after its close loss to Cal, Virginia played its most complete game of the season, routing Stanford 89-69 at JPJ.

“I felt like we showed up all on the same night,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “That’s what we’ve been trying to kind of get to. And if we do that, we can be a very dangerous team.”

UVA showed that against UNC. The challenge for the Hoos now is to build on that breakthrough victory.

“Obviously one game at a time,” Agugua-Hamilton said, “but we’re just focused on just embracing our gifts and not being nervous, not being anxious, not worrying about the next game or anything like that, just staying present and competing. And we’ve shown in spurts, we’ve shown in closing out games this season, that when we do that, we’re a dangerous team, and then when we don’t do that, then those are the times that we drop games.

“So in a situation like this, anything can happen in March, and we know tomorrow is really not promised. We’ve just got to stay present and compete and we got to ride the wave from this North Carolina game, because that was a great way to end the regular season and do it on the road and prove that we can compete and win against a top-10 team.”

To receive Jeff White’s articles by email, click the appropriate box in this link to subscribe.