Sports

MEYER: Women’s basketball set to rebuild

Despite the fact that it’s almost something of an inevitability in any sport, the idea of rebuilding is just something that naturally makes us cringe as fans when we think about it, most likely because of the almost not-so-subtle embedded message ‘-‘- expect to lose and try your best to be patient.

Not exactly being thrilled by this prospect doesn’t make us overzealous or fickle, but as fans of the game, we’re driven by an unrelenting optimism that all will turn out for the best even when things couldn’t be bleaker. It’s just in our nature and to many of us, the mere thought of a rebuilding year withers away at even the faintest, most far-fetched hopes, leaving us with nothing more than despair and some very premature sighs of, ‘wait till next year.’

We see examples of these struggling, retooling teams and their downtrodden fan bases everywhere. We’re seeing it in the NFL right now with teams like the Lions, the Chiefs and the Raiders, in the NBA with the Kings and Nets. Hell, the Pirates have managed to be in rebuilding mode for the last fifteen-plus years.

Rebuilding happens in the college ranks, too, albeit in a very different way. The sacrificial act of blowing up a team and starting over doesn’t happen in the wake of salary dumps or personnel changes in NCAA sports, but with players staying a maximum of four years before exhausting their eligibility (which in an age of ‘one-and-done’ phenoms is something exceedingly rare these days), there’s always turnover to be dealt with.

And unless you’re the North Carolina men’s basketball program or USC football program, you are always going to have a down year here and there ‘-‘- it’s just the nature of the beast.

Amidst all of this is the 2009-10 edition of the BU women’s basketball team. While the spotlight has understandably been on the resurgent men’s program and their new attitude (an attitude that evidently doesn’t know how to play defense based on last Friday’s game), it’s easy to forget that the Terrier women were front row and center last year when it came to hoops at BU.

The 2008-09 season was widely considered to be the best in the program’s history, with the team compiling a 25-8 mark overall and an astounding 16-0 run through America East regular-season play. They had star power in Kristi Dini, Amarachi Umez-Eronini, Christine Kinneary and most importantly America East Player of the Year Jesyka Burks-Wiley.

There just seemed to be something special about the team, not in the sense that they were destined to make some sort of Cinderella run to the Final Four, but that they could finish out the conference slate undefeated and make the NCAA Tournament as a coronation, a last hurrah of sorts, to an accomplished, star-studded senior class.

However, the dreams of conference perfection and a chance to play on the national stage both vanished in one fell swoop with a loss to Vermont in the conference tournament finals.’

As much as it hurt and as frustrating as it may have been to have the lone conference loss be the one game of the season that mattered the most, nothing can be taken away from that team and what they achieved in what was truly a banner year.

What possibly made that loss in the finals leave a lasting sting, though, was the fact that on paper, last year was the year ‘-‘- the year for BU women’s basketball to attain something remarkable.

This is no disrespect to this year’s team, but the facts are telling.

The quartet of stars that I mentioned earlier on in the column? All of them were seniors and are long gone, except for Kinneary who has stayed on as the team’s Director of Basketball Operations (admittedly pretty cool).

With the losses of those four players also go four of the five starters from last year, three first-team all-conference selections, 65 percent of the team’s minutes, 55 percent of the team’s rebounds, 80 percent of the team’s assists, 75 percent of the team’s steals and, most notably, 73 percent of the team’s total points.

Needless to say, there is going to be a very noticeable drop in performance from last year’s to this year’s team, something echoed in the preseason America East coaches’ poll ‘-‘- the Terriers have been picked to finish fifth among the conference’s nine teams.

It’s a far cry from where the BU women were last year, and everyone including myself has deemed it to be a rebuilding year.

This is by no means writing off the Terriers this year ‘-‘- in fact, I see a lot of positives.

While the departures from the team are immense losses, there are some key returning players like forward Aly Hinton, guard Alex Young and some strong senior leadership from Louisville, Ky.’s own Maggie McKemie.

Kelly Greenberg has been a fantastic coach for this program in her six years here and in the aftermath of last year’s benchmark success, she was duly rewarded with a contract extension through 2014. Greenberg has shown that she can get the most out of the talent that she has to work with, and this year could very well present her biggest challenge yet.

The best part of a rebuilding year comes with the fact that the bar is set low, so gone is the pressure to live up to some set of expectations. A new set of players will step up and produce, and the chance will be provided for the team to play with a chip on its shoulder, out to prove that they are better than what conventional wisdom deems them to be.

After all, who knows ‘-‘- maybe the absence of any lofty expectations and a new core of stars that come in a rebuilding season may turn out to be the kind of formula that the BU women can use to make some noise and turn some heads this year out on the hardwood.

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