The Boston University women’s basketball team began this season with one goal in mind: to win the America East conference tournament and advance to its first ever NCAA tournament.
The Terriers (13-13, 10-5 America East) will get their chance next weekend from Mar. 13-15 when they travel to the Chase Family Arena in Hartford to take part in the eight-team tournament as the third seed. They will face Northeastern University, Stony Brook University or the University of New Hampshire in the first round match-up. If they win that game, they will play the winner of the opposite quarterfinal game between the University of Vermont and Binghamton University or the host team Hartford University. The match-ups will be finalized after the conference season ends on Saturday.
The only team that the Terriers under any scenario will not face until the finals is the University of Maine (22-4, 15-0). BU fans need not fret about not being able to play the conference champion Black Bears, who are riding an 18-game unbeaten streak that included a 59-37 win over the Terriers on Jan. 29 at Case Gymnasium. The Terriers will get the last shot at spoiling Maine’s undefeated regular season conference record in a game tomorrow at 1 p.m. at Maine’s Alfond Arena.
The Terriers have more than just the simple motivation of avenging their largest loss of the year. They will be looking to see if the improvements they have made since their last meeting will result in a different outcome.
‘Our team has a lot of pride and they were a little embarrassed after the last game [against Maine], but we’re more concerned with how we’re playing and seeing what we can do,’ said BU coach Margaret McKeon. ‘We’ll be looking to see whether the areas we’ve focused on for improvement are all set for us to make a conference tournament run.’
The inside game for BU will possibly be missing one of its season-long contributors for the Maine game and the conference tournament. Six-foot 5-inch junior center Amparo Lopez (4.9 rebounds per game) is listed as questionable after sitting out Wednesday’s game with a bruised knee.
With the inside corps missing a player, the rest of the frontcourt will be asked to contribute a little extra on the offensive end. If junior Marisa Moseley and sophomores Adrienne Norris and Larissa Parr respond the way they did in BU’s last game, a 71-53 win at home against Binghamton, the Terriers should be just fine. Norris had 15 points, Parr 12 points and Moseley had six assists to help BU shoot 67.7 percent from the field in the second half and dish out 24 assists on 29 shots. That performance came just days after BU’s 71-60 win at home against Northeastern, when the Terriers passed for 21 assists on 25 shots.
‘If you can make the extra pass like we have been, you’re going to get open looks,’ McKeon said. ‘That’s the way to beat Maine.
‘We have a lot more offensive threats now that will give them problems. We need Adrienne, Marisa and Larissa to continue to play the way they’ve been playing. And obviously we need the Katies [junior Terhune and freshman Meinhardt] to do what they’ve been doing all season.’
The Terriers also have experimented with a man-to-man defense, much different than the zone defense they have played for most of the first part of the season. McKeon hopes the man-to-man will work a little better than the zone that allowed Maine to pass the ball quickly around the perimeter, often finding America East Player of the Year candidate junior Heather Ernest (20.2 points per game and 9.8 rebounds per game) in the post. Ernest finished the first game with a double-double, 20 points and 12 rebounds.
‘We’re going to use the man-to-man match-up, so we can see what we can do different defensively,’ McKeon said.
The Terriers are hoping they have improved enough to be able to beat Maine. They wouldn’t argue however, if that win came next Saturday instead of this Saturday.
‘If we make the conference finals,’ McKeon said. ‘We’ll probably have to play Maine then, too.’
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