The players, coaches and fans of the Boston University women’s basketball team can look at its 63-46 upset loss to the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the America East Tournament quarterfinals in one of two ways.
Optimistic individuals can look at the stunning loss as a positive event, one which gives the team all spring and summer to study what went wrong and learn what it has to do to take the next step. By this reasoning, we can expect a hungrier, more experienced team to take the floor next season.
The pessimists, however, probably look at the loss as a wasted opportunity, one which, given the fickle nature of collegiate athletics, may never come again.
However you want to look at their last game, the bottom line is that the massive rebuilding project head coach Margaret McKeon undertook three years ago finally began to produce positive results. For the first time in seven years, the Terriers finished with a winning record, going 17-11 and 10-6 in conference play. It was only the sixth season in team history with 17 or more wins, and only the third time — the first since 1988-89 — the Terriers posted 10 or more conference wins in a season.
Optimism was in abundance when the Terriers took the floor for Midnight Madness last October. Last year’s freshmen had a year under their belts, and they were now joined by one of the nation’s top recruting classes,, highlighted by forwards Larissa Parr and Adrienne Norris. The Terriers finally had some much-needed size in the paint, but they were still very young and inexperienced. And after Amparo Lopez, the 6’5″ junior-college transfer and the grand prize of the recruiting class, was sidelined for the season with back problems, it was beginning to look like another year full of growing pains and heartbreaking losses. But after losing their season opener to the University of South Florida, the Terriers rolled off five consecutive wins.
Included in that streak were two of the high points of BU’s season — a dominating 93-77 road win on Nov. 20 over a Harvard University team that won 22 games and the Ivy League title, and winning the Christmas City Classic with a thrilling win over host Lehigh University during Thanksgiving weekend.
The winning streak was snapped by an 81-56 loss at Baylor University, which finished the season ranked seventh in the ESPN/USA Today poll, but the Terriers went into the intersession break with a 6-2 record. Things didn’t go quite so well for the Terriers over the holidays, when they lost five of seven games against the toughest stretch of their schedule.
But as BU students returned to school for the new semester, the Terriers returned to their winning ways, rolling off nine wins in their final 12 games to post a regular-season record of 17-10. And when the University of Hartford upset the University of Maine on the last day of the regular season (Hartford’s first-ever win in Orono), the Terriers had the second seed in the America East tournament, their highest conference tournament seed since 1990. That year, the Terriers reached the championship game before losing to Maine.
But there would be no net cutting for the Terriers this year.
Still, the 2001-02 campaign was the breakthrough season that Terrier fans have been waiting for. Sophomore guard Katie Terhune led the conference in scoring with 18.6 points per game, the fourth-highest single-season scoring average in team history and the highest since Debbie Miller-Palmore’s 18.9-point scoring clip in 1978-79. Terhune also became only the ninth Terrier to be named First Team All-Conference, and the first since Julie Schmidt in 1994-95.
Norris became only the sixth Terrier to be named to the conference’s All-Rookie team, averaging 7.8 points and a team-high 6.4 rebounds per game. Parr, Norris’s classmate, was tied for second on the team in scoring with 8.0 points per game and shot a team-best 46.5 percent from the field.
When the Terriers resume practice in the fall, they will do so without the services of departing seniors Annie Tomasini, Dia Dufault and Anne Nelson. But all five starters return next year, three of whom will be juniors or seniors.
Another quality freshman class will arrive on campus to add depth, scoring, and defense, and if Lopez can come back at the level she was at before the injury, the Terriers may have the best front line in the conference. Until then, it’s time to hang up the uniforms, retract and lock up the Case Gymnasium bleachers and head into the off-season.
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