Hoos Benefiting From Amanze’s Post Presence

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

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Tougher tests are coming for the University of Virginia women’s basketball team, which has yet to face a Power 4 opponent, and Tabitha Amanze will soon find herself battling players of similar stature in the post.

In UVA’s first four games, however, the 6-foot-4 Amanze has generally been too big and too strong for opponents down low, and her statistics reflect that. She’s averaging 12.3 points and 9.5 rebounds per game and leads UVA (3-1) with nine blocked shots. She’s shooting 54.3 percent from the floor.

A transfer from Princeton, where she spent three years, Amanze had her best game as a Cavalier on Sunday afternoon. She posted career highs in points (21) and rebounds (12) to help Virginia rout Radford 77-46 at John Paul Jones Arena.

“It was great to see Tabbie just really assert herself there in the paint,” said Amaka Agugua-Hamilton, who’s in her fourth season as the Wahoos’ head coach. “That’s what I’ve known she could do since day one, and I just am happy to see her do that and come into her own.”

Virginia totaled 28 second-chance points against Radford (2-3), thanks in no small part to Amanze’s work around the basket. Of her 12 rebounds, 11 came at the offensive end.

Overall, the Hoos outrebounded the smaller Highlanders 48-19. Senior guard Paris Clark nearly posted a double-double too, grabbing nine rebounds to go with her 12 points, and 6-foot-3 wing Romi Levy finished with eight rebounds.

“We want to be able to dominate the boards at both ends,” Agugua-Hamilton said.

Amanze, who’s posted two double-doubles this season, is one of the seven transfers who joined the UVA program for 2025-26. A native of Nigeria, she came to the United States for high school and spent four years as a boarding student at Blair Academy in New Jersey.

From there, Amanze moved on to Princeton, where she missed the 2022-23 season with an injury. She played in 15 games in 2023-24 and in 28 last season, when she averaged 6.0 points and 4.0 rebounds.

When Amanze entered the transfer portal after the 2024-25 season, Virginia took note. Agugua-Hamilton was looking for strong post players and was confident Amanze would strengthen the Cavaliers’ frontcourt. No. 7 hasn’t disappointed.

“She’s physical,” Agugua-Hamilton said after UVA’s season-opening win over Morgan State. “She can finish. She can score. She rebounds. She blocks shots.”

Amanze, an economics major, said her transition from Princeton to UVA has gone smoothly.

“I have the best teammates who support me, the best staff, coaches who just support me,” Amanze said Sunday. “But in terms of the game, it’s a different level of physicality that, honestly, I enjoy. It’s been great. I have the teammates around me that I need kind of help me through it, but I’ve been loving it.”

In an interview before the season, Amanze said she was looking for a good academic school with a basketball program whose “style of play kind of fits how I like to play. And I think Virginia, for the most part, checks a lot of boxes in that regard. They want to play fast, and I got the opportunity to talk to Coach Mox throughout the recruitment process. She wants to play fast and she sees a lot of value in bigs that can move, that are quick and can get up and down the floor. They just checked a lot of those boxes for me.”

Another frontcourt addition is 6-foot-5 forward Adeang Ring, a transfer from the University of Central Florida who’s comfortable on the perimeter. Ring hit 2 of 4 shots from the beyond the arc Sunday and finished with 10 points and five rebounds in about 18 minutes off the bench.

“Adeang just stayed ready,” Agugua-Hamilton said, “and when her number was called, she came in and impacted the game really, really well on both ends. So that’s what it’s all about. When your number’s called, come in and contribute.”

Ring wasn’t the only one to hurt the Highlanders from long range Sunday. In their first game since losing Thursday night to UMBC, the Hoos hit 8 of 20 attempts from beyond the 3-point range. Ring, Clark and Kymora Johnson hit two 3-pointers apiece, and Levy and reserve guard Raiane Dos Santos had one each.

For the Cavaliers, it was a welcome change from the UMBC game, in which they were 0 for 14 from long range.

“I think we’ve always been a great shooting team,” Ring said. “In practice, we hit 3s every day. We work on our shots, whether it’s individual workouts or in practice, so it was just a matter of everything falling into place and, even though we had a bad shooting game last game, just having confidence … Everybody was shooting with confidence, whether they missed or not, and it just showed in the stat of 40 percent from 3.”

The loss to UMBC did not “really reflect what kind of team we are and what kind of team we’re going to be,” Agugua-Hamilton said. “So we had to learn through that hard loss. But everybody stayed positive. Everybody stayed together and believed in themselves, and I was just really happy with how we came out and competed.”

Sophomore forward Breona Hurd, who scored a career-best 22 points against UMBC, made her first start of the season Sunday. Midway through the third quarter, she landed awkwardly after challenging a Radford shot and had to be helped off the court. Hurd didn’t play again and watched the final quarter from the bench with an ice pack on her left knee.

Agugua-Hamilton said after the game that she didn’t have an update on Hurd’s injury.

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