University of North Carolina Athletics
Tar Heels Roll On Despite Adversity
December 30, 2006 | Women's Basketball
Dec. 30, 2006
By Lauren Brownlow
Most would laugh if you told them that a 93-52 victory would somehow teach your team how to deal with adversity. Christina Dewitt was suspended for violating a team rule. Jessica Breland had been battling a flu-like bug for the past week. Most importantly, junior Erlana Larkins was in Florida attending the funeral of a close family friend and would miss her first game in a Tar Heel uniform.
It wasn't looking good in the first half. The Tar Heels seemed lost, allowing easy backdoor lay-ups down low and making careless mistakes on offense. After mounting a 10-0 lead in the first 2:08, Tennessee Tech went on a 12-5 run to bring the score to 15-12 with 10:03 left in the first half. The Tar Heels kept scoring, but so did Tennessee Tech. With 5:40 to go in the half, the Tar Heels were only up 21-17 and could not shake this team.
The Tar Heels went on a 26-13 run to end the half up 47-30, but they had allowed Tennessee Tech to shoot 42.9% from the field, a number that would have been a season high for a Tar Heel opponent if it had held up. (The previous high was Gonzaga's 39.3%.)
Though Larkins was gone, her teammates stepped in to pick up the slack as five Tar Heels scored in double figures. LaToya Pringle recorded her third double-double of both the season and her career with 13 points and 13 rebounds. Her 13 boards were a career high, and her six offensive rebounds tied a season high. She also swatted away five shots, which brings her season total to 30 blocks (3.1 a game). While blocking just 15 shots in her first eight games this season (1.9 blocks a game), she has blocked 32 (4.6 a game) in the last seven games to bring her up to 3.1 blocks a game on the year.
Despite fighting off a virus, Breland set a career high in blocked shots with four and added nine points, five rebounds, an assist and a steal in 18 minutes. Of Breland's 85 rebounds on the season, 37 of them (43.5%) have been offensive rebounds and given her team an opportunity to score second-chance points. That ranks second on the team behind Larkins, who has grabbed 65 offensive rebounds out of 124 total (52.4%).
"Jessica, she's just young," Coach Hatchell said. "She just needs experience, and of course she's still a little bit weak from having the - I guess it was almost like the flu, because she was really sick there for several days and couldn't do anything, so she was probably still a little bit weak there. But she did some nice things for us."
There were moments in the game where the trapping defense worked beautifully, but Tennessee Tech would often heave the ball to a cutting post player who would lay it in uncontested. Larkins plays goaltender when the Tar Heels run their full-court trapping defense, and her presence was sorely missed in the first half.
Camille Little played perhaps the most important role, setting a career high in assists (7) and steals (8). While her teammates were the ones banging in the paint in Larkins' absence, the senior Little took it upon herself to key the defense and her traps helped slow the Tennessee Tech offense down enough to make it harder to find the open cutters. Tennessee Tech was 7-of-15 in the paint in the first half and just 4-of-13 in the second half.
"Camille is the front of our defense and does a great job. We started off the game with a couple of steals and good traps, and Camille sets the tone for us defensively up there," Coach Hatchell said. "Erlana is anchoring the back, and she gets out there in the back and covers so well back there. We missed that, because they were able to get it down inside and get some penetrating passes before we could rotate back. When Erlana's back there, that's very difficult to do."
Rashanda McCants tied her career high of 16 points for the fifth time this season, and added seven rebounds and three assists. McCants also tied her career-high in steals with five and her season high in minutes played (27).
Ivory Latta looked a little frustrated during the course of the game, as she turned the ball over eight times and was whistled for two fouls in the first half and picked up her third early in the second half. Despite that, she shot 3-of-8 from the field (2-of-6 from the three-point line) and ended up with eight assists, finding her teammates cutting back door, and turning it over at times by just trying to do a bit too much.
She did such a good job helming the team that Coach Hatchell didn't even notice she had struggled. "Eight assists, but eight turnovers - that's a little unusual for her," she said, glancing down at the stat sheet. "She was all right in the locker room. She wasn't saying much. But she'll be ready for ACC (play)."
After the game, Coach Hatchell asked everyone except the team and coaches to leave the locker room so that they could have moment for their grieving teammate.
"I said, `This is our family. We're like a family, when one person is not there, of course we miss them. That's a part of us that's not there.' At the end, we always have a prayer at the end, and we prayed to remember Erlana and her family at a difficult time for her right now," Coach Hatchell said. "We missed her, and I think her being back to start off the ACC will give us a lift. It just shows how every single one of them is such an important part of our team."
Lauren Brownlow is the managing editor of Tar Heel Monthly.
