ACC Tourney Serves as Learning Experience for Hoos

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

GREENSBORO, N.C. — In 2022-23, its first season under head coach Amaka Agugua-Hamilton, the University of Virginia women’s basketball team won 15 games. The Cavaliers recorded 16 victories in 2023-24, and they’re at 17 this season.

UVA figures to get an opportunity to win more games before the season ends, but that won’t be in the ACC tournament. No. 7 seed California eliminated No. 10 seed Virginia 75-58 in a second-round game Thursday night at the First Horizon Coliseum.

“There was a lot of self-inflicted things I think we could have corrected,” Agugua-Hamilton said, “and we really didn’t start being urgent and competing until probably the last 15 minutes of the game. By then we were in a pretty big hole.”

Cal (25-7) won the teams’ regular-season meeting too, but that game, played late last month at John Paul Jones Arena, was much closer. The Golden Bears raced out to a 9-0 lead Thursday night “and then kind of never looked back,” head coach Charmin Smith said.

Virginia (17-15) trailed 24-13 after one quarter, 41-25 at the half, and 62-39 after three quarters. In the final period, the Cavaliers rallied and cut their deficit to 13 on a Kymora Johnson 3-pointer, and they missed two shots that would have made it an 11-point game.

“We say it all the time: You never know what can happen,” said Johnson, who finished with a game-high 18 points. “It’s March, anything can happen. I didn’t even realize it was that close of a game, but just fighting until the end, that’s all we could do as a team.”

The Hoos were shorthanded for most of the game. Fifty-one seconds into the second quarter, with the score 26-13, Latasha Lattimore fell and hit her head on the floor, and then a Cal player landed on her. After an extended stoppage during which UVA’s medical staff attended to her, Lattimore was helped off the court to the locker room. She didn’t return to the bench, and the Bears stretched their lead to 26 early in the third quarter.

“We closed the gap a couple times a little bit,” sophomore forward Edessa Noyan said, “but it was just too hard to get back, because they got too many second chance points. And with Tash being out, that hurt us.”

The 6-foot-4 Lattimore averages 14.3 points, 8.2 rebounds and 2.2 blocked shots per game, and without her the Hoos lacked a low-post threat.

“We need Tash,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “She does a lot for us on the court.”

At Virginia’s postgame press conference, Agugua-Hamilton had no update on Lattimore’s status but said, “I think she’s OK.”

UVA lost another key player early in the fourth quarter when freshman Breona Hurd, who’s averaging 9.4 points and 5.0 rebounds per game, took a blow to the head. She didn’t return to the game.

“We’ve had a season filled with adversity,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “A lot of injuries. We’ve had bodies in and out. We’ve had illnesses. We’ve had all kinds of things. We still to date haven’t had our full roster that was available for this season in one practice.”

The slow start didn’t help Thursday night.

“It’s always difficult,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “It’s happened to us many a times this year. We usually do a good job of climbing out of that, but we did want to start [well and] punch early. That didn’t happen … Then obviously Tash went out pretty early, too.”

Four players scored in double figures for Cal, and three of them shot 50 percent or better from the floor.

“They’re just great shooters,” Johnson said of the Bears. “Numbers don’t lie.”

For Virginia, junior guard Paris Clark (15 points) and Hurd (10 points) joined Johnson in double figures. Johnson and Clark, however, were a combined 13 for 34 from the floor against a Cal defense that prioritized stopping them.

“We were really concerned about their guard play in particular,” Smith said. “I thought we did a good job of containing them.”

Cal is one of three schools that joined the ACC last summer, along with SMU and Stanford. SMU didn’t qualify for the conference tournament, and Stanford lost in the first round Wednesday night. The Bears advanced to the quarterfinals and will face No. 2 seed Notre Dame at 5 p.m. Friday.

Smith said her team has “something to prove. This is our first year in the ACC, and not many people know a lot about us. We wanted to make a statement, and I think we did really well in our first year, and now it’s about making a statement for the NCAA selection committee and trying to fight our way off of that 8 line, 8-9 line … I think we’re a really good team, and we just want to fight for a better seed.”

Virginia appears headed to a different tournament. The Cavaliers went 1-1 in the inaugural Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament last season, and the field for this year’s WBIT will be announced March 16.

“Hopefully we get invited to that tournament,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “We have to see if we’re healthy enough and things like that. But we’ve got competitors that want to play in March.”

Clark and Johnson joined her at the postgame press conference. “I know they want to play, and I know there’s players in the locker room that want to play,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “So we just have to digest this loss, understand what we need to get better at, and then go from there.”

Noyan is eager to play again. “I don’t want to finish [the season] how we finished this game,” she said.

Clark agreed. “I think it’ll be a good experience for us to have some type of postseason, just getting that experience and being able to face adversity and realizing what it is to win in March.”

The Cavaliers arrived in Greensboro this week looking to win an ACC tournament game for the first time since 2019, and they succeeded, defeating No. 15 seed Pittsburgh 64-50 in the first round Wednesday.

For a team that isn’t particularly deep, playing again about 25 hours later posed physical challenges, “but it’s March, and you have to push through that,” said Clark, who like Johnson played the full 40 minutes Thursday night.

The loss to Cal stung, but this ACC tournament represented a step forward for the UVA program, Clark said. “I think it was definitely special to win that one game, and we’ll be back next year.”

Agugua-Hamilton said: “This is just another thing that we can learn from and grow from and make sure that we understand the urgency it takes, the physicality it takes, the mental toughness, all that to win in March. That’s what we’re focused on.”

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