University of North Carolina Athletics
Brownlow: No One Knows
February 25, 2011 | Women's Basketball
Feb. 25, 2011
By Lauren Brownlow
There were a lot of questions coming into this game - how would the Tar Heels respond to a lackluster performance at NC State? How would Jessica Breland, Italee Lucas and Cetera DeGraffenreid play on their Senior Nights? Would Carolina be able to put itself in position for a first-round bye in the ACC Tournament?
The answers to all of those questions are not good, for now. But the most important question coming into the game, and one that is still unanswered is who is this team exactly?
Carolina beat Duke on the Carmichael Arena floor just over two weeks ago. Since then, they have struggled to beat a weak Clemson team, lost by double digits to Miami and NC State and then by seven at home to Georgia Tech, scoring just 57 points.
Italee Lucas, the Tar Heels' sharp-shooter, hasn't been able to throw it in the ocean from beyond the arc, even when she gets good looks. And she had no idea what's wrong with her team recently. She, like everyone else, doesn't have any answers.
"That's a good question. If we could figure it out, I'm sure we probably would have won tonight," she said when asked that. And when she was asked about the offense being out of rhythm and what was going on there, she echoed a similar sentiment. "If we knew the exact answer, we wouldn't be doing it. We've just got to get it together, I guess."
Georgia Tech is a team that will invade your personal space on defense in a way that is unsettling to anyone, but the Tar Heels are so aggressive offensively that strategy usually backfires. But they weren't aggressive offensively - at least, not in the right ways - and after struggling to get a stop on one end, they would often throw it away seconds later. Carolina had 22 turnovers that led to 18 Georgia Tech points.
Hatchell was perplexed that her team couldn't break a press it managed to navigate quite well in Atlanta in the ACC opener; the Tar Heels fell apart late to lose that game but still had few issues with the press itself.
"We don't know what's going on," Chay Shegog, who had 13 points, said. "A lot of our turnovers have been in the halfcourt set, too, so it wasn't just the press that bothered us. We've got to figure it out."
One thing Shegog does know is that she's been in this situation before, every year of her career, where the team seems to be fading down the stretch and has to get it together. But they haven't been able to do it yet. In 2009, Carolina had four losses on February 26th and lost three of its final six games, starting with an overtime loss at Duke to end the year and followed by second-round ACC and NCAA Tournament exits. Last year, Carolina was 2-7 in the month of February and closed the season losing nine of its final 12 games.
This team is older, more mature and more determined than they have been in the past. That can and hopefully will make a difference. "We don't have a lot of underclassmen. A majority of the people on the team have been through what we're going through now, so it's nothing new to anybody," Shegog said.
This Tar Heel team has looked amazing at times, rolling through the Rainbow Wahine Showdown in late November followed immediately by a win over a very good Iowa team that is just outside the top 25. Then they go to Maryland and lose by 23 points or by 16 at NC State. There's just no telling which Tar Heel team will come out and how they will handle adversity during the course of a game.
The question becomes then, will they be able to turn it around? "I'm more confident than I've been in past years yes, with this particular team," Shegog said. "We've just got to regroup because the ACC is a whole other season and the postseason is a whole other season. We can't dwell on the past."
Lauren Brownlow is the executive editor of Tar Heel Monthly.
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