Brownlow: Tar Heels Will Be Fast, Friendly

October 31, 2008 | Women's Basketball

By: UNC Athletic Communications

Oct. 31, 2008

By Lauren Brownlow

Carolina has quite a crowded backcourt this season - so crowded that when a reporter jokingly asked Coach Hatchell if she planned to use a five-guard lineup, she half-jokingly replied, "We might. You never know."

With the loss of two of Carolina's better post players in its history, Erlana Larkins and LaToya Pringle, this team has taken on a new mentality. All of Carolina's post players (except for the 6-5 Chay Shegog) are more wiry than bulky. Most of the team (including the 6-3 Jessica Breland) can shoot - and make - three-pointers. The Tar Heels have always had a talented and fast backcourt ready to run the break and push the opposition on both ends, but this year it's almost ridiculous. You know that you have a stacked backcourt when seven out of your 14 team members are attending a point guard camp over the summer.

One of those seven was senior Rashanda McCants, who will actually move to the four-spot. At 6-1, she is fifth-tallest Tar Heel but is long, lean and athletic. She's one of the more versatile players in the game, capable of playing anywhere on the court. Just as she will move back to her high school position, so will teammate Italee Lucas, who played shooting guard in high school. With the injury to Alex Miller last season, she had to take on some point guard duties but now gets to concentrate exclusively on shooting and slashing.

Miller will get a new start this season as well after telling her patella last season as a senior. She gets one more chance and her determination and fire has inspired her teammates. "The five seniors - we've grown together, especially having Alex back," McCants said. "It's really difficult to explain it but I seriously have five sisters that have been through the pain and the hurt of losing big games and having to come together and rebuild it. So it's kind of like a rebuilding of a new everything."

This group is so close that Hatchell wonders if it doesn't have too much chemistry. There is no Camille Little or Erlana Larkins around to be yell at teammates who make mistakes. Even though this group of five seniors - McCants, Miller, Heather Claytor, Iman McFarland and Laura Barry - has been "corrected" plenty of times, none of them has yet felt like they can carry that torch.

"I feel like we're a little more - I wouldn't say timid, but we're not the kinds who will bark at each other, which I feel like we need a little bit of sooner or later," Claytor said. "I've gotten yelled at by Erlana, Ivory (Latta), Camille - especially Camille. So you need to experience it, I think, to make you better. But I feel like we're so close as a team. In the past, we've had a couple different groups of people who have been close and I feel like our whole team has just meshed so well this year."

In addition to new roles, the Smith Center will be a new (and temporary) venue for the team while Carmichael is renovated. It doesn't have the same intimacy and even during sold-out men's games, it can get quiet. But Hatchell said that the aura of the Smith Center affects opponents. "I've seen this happen where as other teams come in here, they walk in here and it's like, `Wow.' It's actually an hour or two later that the `wow' is just starting to wear off and hopefully by that time we've already got a pretty good lead," Hatchell said.

Hatchell has been at Carolina for 23 years and while every season presents a new challenge, this guard-heavy team is unique. Still she's like a scientist, constantly adding, subtracting and tweaking her combinations to get the right ones during practice.

Hatchell is now 16 wins away from 800 and it seems surreal. She still remembers when she first started coaching how she would stay up all night "beating the walls" after a loss. She's learned to handle those a little better, but she still couldn't sleep Wednesday night, anticipating a possible commitment from a recruit. She and her staff are still trying to go faster and they observed a high school boys' practice recently to try to get some tips.

"I'm so blessed and so fortunate to have the staff I have and the situation that I'm in. It's like Christmas every day," Hatchell said. "It's like being in a fantasy land, but it's not always up. There are some downs too. But the downs are what really gets you fired up and keep you going and make you have that drive and passion and enthusiasm."

She's still the same coach, complete with her Hatchell-isms. In a recent practice, DeGraffenreid failed to call out a screen to a teammate who was subsequently leveled. Hatchell stopped the action right away.

"T," she said. "Where you're from in Western North Carolina, do ya'll have bears up there?"

"Yeah, we do," DeGraffenreid replied.

"Now, if a bear is chasing you, what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to run faster."

"But are you going to say something?"

DeGraffenreid paused. "Yeah, I would holler."

Hatchell said, "Well then you talk on this court like a bear was chasing you."

When reporters asked her about it later, she confirmed that she has indeed seen bears around her home in Cullowhee. But she wasn't entirely truthful about the way that she would respond to a bear chasing her. "I would run. I don't know much about screaming because it would just draw more attention from all the other bears," DeGraffenreid said, smiling. "I would try to outrun the bear first. When she said that yesterday I couldn't stop laughing. But I got what she was saying out of it."

Lauren Brownlow is the managing editor of Tar Heel Monthly.