It’s time to choose.
After a season that certainly had its fair share of ups and downs, the Boston University women’s basketball team enters its second offseason under coach Kelly Greenberg with many choices ahead.
The Terriers must decide whether to let the heartbreak of a loss to the University of Hartford in the America East Championship brew in their minds until November. They must determine just how to view their non-invite to the NIT — despite being the highest-ranked team in the country without a postseason playoff spot. They must judge exactly how the graduation of seniors Shannon Petranoff and Rachael Vanderwal will affect their chemistry. They must opt to spend their offseason preparing for next year. And they must choose to improve.
With the ability to make all of those choices, there’s still the unpredictability that comes with the end of a long, successful season.
“That’s what so great about team sports,” Greenberg said. “Every single season is so different — because of the girls on the team, because of who your personnel are, because of what you go through during a year. Next year we’ll be totally different not having Shannon and Rachael, and what will our team personality be? We don’t know.”
What the Terriers do know, after finishing the year 18-12, is that they simply can’t afford to lose some of the games they lost this season.
“For us to be a legitimate postseason tournament team we can’t lose to some teams we lost to, and we did lose to some teams that we should not have lost to,” Greenberg said. “But that’s what we’re going to take into next year, let’s really take care of business and beat the teams we’re supposed to.”
And beating those teams should be much easer with the young players that emerged this season for BU. Freshmen Jesyka Burks-Wiley (7.8 points per game, 5.4 rebounds per game) and Christine Kinneary (4.8, 3.1) and sophomores Kasey Devine (7.8, 7.7) and Cheri Raffo (10.9, 3.1) all saw tons of playing time and improved exponentially with each game.
In the tournament, all four players stepped up when they were needed most — Burks-Wiley to the point of being named to the All-Tournament team after her 42-point, 38-rebound performance over three games.
“I think Jes learned a lot about herself in the tournament. I mean, her competitive nature just came out. Jess is our physical player. She’s not our tallest, but she’s physical,” Greenberg said. “I told Jes after the first game we played at Hartford this year, ‘Jes, you’re as good as those two forwards everyone wants to talk about. If not, Jes, I think you can be better. The only difference between them and you right now is that they’re in better shape.’
“And I think in the last month and a half, I think that Jes has gotten in much better shape, which has really helped her game. Already I know from the strength coach, she was the first person up there the day after the Hartford loss, running, so I think she really learned a lot. She’s a team player and no one was gonna stop her. She had an unbelievable tournament and I’m really happy for her and I think her teammates are kinda like, ‘Yeah this is Jes,’ and very excited about next year.”
Excitement or not, the feeling of falling to Hartford in the championship is one which certainly won’t go away. But if the Terriers so choose, that feeling can make them an even better team next season.
“I know from Jes and Cheri and the way our girls responded to that loss, I’m not gonna have to say much to prepare us for America East,” Greenberg said. “I think that the girls really learned a lot, we started a young team in that gamee — two freshmen, two sophomores.
“I had some friends and family at the game saying, ‘to see your players respond that way, as a coach, you can’t ask for anything more.’ And that’s so true,” she continued. “I can’t make a team be so mad or so sad that we lost, and you know that they’re truly and totally invested when they respond that way and that’s all you can ask for sometimes. So I think the feeling of that loss is gonna go a long way.”
An already dangerous team, Hartford helped improve the image of America East by winning its first-round NCAA Tournament game over No. 6 seeded Temple University, 64-58, before losing to the third-seeded University of Georgia, 73-54.
“I sat there and watched that game and thought, ‘How are we going to beat this team next year?'” Greenberg said. “And I do believe that if we do the things in the offseason, and I know the girls are hungry, there are ways, and we’ll make sure we figure that out. Them helping our conference to another level only puts us in a position to make sure we’re at that level, and we will be.”
A big part of whether the Terriers get to that level lies in the choices each member of the team makes during their downtime now and until the 2006-07 season begins.
“I think over the spring and summer months, it’s really important that our team individually work on their weaknesses,” Greenberg said. “I think that’s when a team really gets better, when each player goes home and works on their weaknesses, then in the fall we can really be better as a group.
“I’m a believer in the offseason. If you have individuals on this team who are self-motivated and self-disciplined, you are that much more of a special team. And that’s their challenge.”
Greenberg mentioned Kinneary as an example.
“Christine is as good as any guard in our conference — she’s got the leadership, she’s got the confidence, she’s got the defense,” she said. “She’s very, very good, so if she can work on that and develop that, I think we can be a very dangerous team.”
If the Terriers are to be a dangerous team, in addition to looking for senior leadership from Erica Kovach (10.5 points per game, 4.5 boards per game) and Katie Meinhardt (9.1, 2.2), they might need some help from their recruits, two of whom are from Pennsylvania — one a 6-foot, 5-inch center and the other an All-State honoree.
“We have our three recruits coming in that we’re very excited about,” Greenberg said. “We played a lot of young people this year, which is great. Now they’re experienced young people and with next year’s freshmen coming in, it should be a nice mix.”
One you’d choose to watch.