University of North Carolina Athletics
Brownlow: More Bumps, Bruises In Victory
February 18, 2008 | Women's Basketball
Feb. 18, 2008
By Lauren Brownlow
Someone should investigate the Chapel Hill water - both the men's and women's basketball teams appear to be catching the injury bug. Both teams lost steady and experienced point guards early in the season (Alex Miller and Bobby Frasor). The situation with the men's team has been well-documented. But Coach Hatchell's Tar Heels have had it pretty rough as well.
Rebecca Gray was first after Miller's season-ending injury, suffering a stress fracture that caused her to miss four games in January. Erlana Larkins broke her hand on January 23rd and has played 11 ACC games with a makeshift cast on her hand. Then Iman McFarland fractured the radial head of her left elbow against Wake Forest on January 31st and has missed the last five games. Heck, even head trainer Terri Jo Rucinski was out for this game with the flu.
Then in just one game, a surprisingly easy win for Carolina over a tough Florida State team at home, both LaToya Pringle and Rashanda McCants suffered injuries that caused them to miss the rest of the game.
This was a typical ACC game with bodies flying, and the first scary incident came with 3.3 seconds left in the first half. Cetera DeGraffenreid appeared to bump heads with a Florida State player and a foul was called. But she was hit so hard in the head that her teammates circled around her, looking at her face. It turned out she lost a contact lens and when the girls began giggling, it was because DeGraffenreid couldn't get it back in. So she gave the contact to a teammate to give to Coach Hatchell, stepped to the line and made one of two to give Carolina a 48-32 halftime lead.
But it didn't take long in the second half for things to get serious. LaToya Pringle was undercut by a Florida State player underneath the basket with 17 minutes left and landed hard on the ground. She came back out later with her fingers taped. With 6:24 to go and Carolina leading 85-55, Carolina's consummate warrior Erlana Larkins, who will remove her cast likely sometime this week, went for a steal. Her body careened out of bounds and took out a scorer's table. Hatchell reached her superstar almost as fast as DeGraffenreid can take it coast to coast.
"I just got over there so quickly that I didn't even see the table. I just guess I cleared everything out. But what I do remember is falling on that chair which wasn't a good feeling. I've been doing that since I've been here," Larkins said. "We're trying to keep Coach Hatchell off our backs because she likes to say, `Intensity for 40 minutes.' So it's good for her to see me with a 25-point lead as a starter dive across the table and I think other people feed off of that. So we just mainly tried to execute and close games and like I said, keep Coach Hatchell off our backs and keep it going."
Then Rashanda McCants, the lone starter remaining in the game with 5:24 to go, tapped a missed shot to her teammates (who proceeded to pull down five more offensive rebounds on the possession and eventually convert a three-point play) and scooted out of the way of the play. A Florida State player fell and all of her weight hit McCants' shin, which is bruised.
The good news is that Larkins was fine, though the table she collapsed on is still a little wobbly. The senior came out of the game at that point (6:24 to go) but it's too bad - she finished with 18 points, eight rebounds, seven assists and six steals in just 26 minutes. Larkins has come close to a triple-double before, but perhaps she could even achieve the elusive quadruple-double with points, rebounds, assists and steals. DeGraffenreid may be the Tar Heel point guard, but the Carolina offense runs through Larkins.
Gray played her best game since before her stress fracture. She hit 3-of-4 shots from the field and 2-of-3 three-pointers, marking the most points she has had since December 9th and the first time she has hit more than one three-pointer in a game since November. Midway through the first half, she drained an open three-pointer and on the next possession, she took Florida State guard Shante Williams off the dribble, hit the lay-up and converted the three-point play. She was visibly pumped up, motioning to count the basket as soon as she heard the whistle.
Italee Lucas turned it over five times but the freshman had her moments. She was fouled driving to the basket three times. In one 19-second sequence in the first half, Lucas was fouled on a drive and made both foul shots. Rashanda McCants intercepted the Florida State inbounds pass and found Lucas, who was fouled on a lay-up that nearly dropped. She missed both, but Florida State lost the handle on the rebound. Lucas got the ball, missed a three-pointer, then tracked down her own rebound and laid it in.
The bench saw quite a bit of action in this game and even with injuries, Carolina is a deeper team than most, featuring good players like Gray, Lucas and Jessica Breland. Despite that, the Carolina bench had its biggest scoring output since the Georgia Tech game on January 5th - 40 points. So as the Tar Heels enter a tough stretch and may have an increasingly banged up line-up, the bench will become even more important. "That's why you have 12, 13 players I guess. That's why I stay on them all the time, even the ones coming off the bench. They've got to be ready any time. You never know what's going to happen. It makes a big difference. We wrap them up and they play," Hatchell said.
Lauren Brownlow is the managing editor of Tar Heel Monthly.
