University of North Carolina Athletics
Brownlow: Not Enough
March 6, 2011 | Women's Basketball
March 6, 2011
By Lauren Brownlow
Jessica Breland's red-rimmed eyes didn't brighten one bit when her head coach told the media - and her, for the first time - that she had broken a 30-year-old ACC Tournament record with 32 made field goals.
Fatigue has been an issue for her before and since her battle with cancer. Four games in four days might have been hard, but it didn't show against Duke on Sunday. "I knew I could play three games back to back because we did it in Hawaii. I was kind of concerned about four games," Breland said. "I wasn't really thinking about my health or anything. I just wanted it. If I had to cut my leg to get it, I would have done it."
That much was clear. The ups and downs she has gone through this season make it easy to forget everything she has had to deal with. Before and during the season, her fellow seniors Cetera DeGraffenreid and Italee Lucas have said how grateful they are to have Breland take the leadership pressure off of both of them. She tried to take charge of this team while simultaneously stepping up her own game to new, National Player of Year-type heights.
Increased defensive attention, heightened expectations (from outsiders and herself) and feeling like she was representing all cancer survivors became too much to bear for Breland at times. This weekend, she proved that she was capable of carrying all of that. But it just wasn't enough. "When you come through what Jessica's been through, it's hard. There's been a lot of distractions," Sylvia Hatchell said. "(She) dug deep. She was breathing hard out there quite a few times, but (the seniors) wanted to win really bad and they played really hard."
Hatchell was the first to point out that fatigue should not be an excuse, since the four games in four days were their own doing. One or two more wins would have put them in the top four seeds with a first-round bye. But it wasn't in the cards, and Duke - which won its first game comfortably - was fresh, and knew they could exploit the Tar Heels' tired legs. "When you're strategizing, that's something we were thinking about, trying to run the ball, trying to push the ball," Duke's Jasmine Thomas, ACC Tournament MVP, said.
The Tar Heels didn't show too many signs of it until the last ten minutes. That's when lay-ups started coming up short, wide-open three's were missing and Carolina could not get to the loose balls they got to in the first half. But they still led by one point with 9:28 left before missing a foul shot short, two lay-ups short, two three's and a jumper in the next 2 1/2 minutes while Duke built an eight-point lead. Carolina did not score for over six minutes and it was Breland, who had nine of Carolina's final 12 points.
Her late scoring push to try to get the Tar Heels back in the game was probably why Duke head coach Joanne P. McCallie was surprised to see Breland's box score; she thought her team had done a good job defending her. "I want to make a statement about Jessica and her courage and what she did to fight back for her team and the way she played in this tournament," McCallie said. "I thought Miami didn't do a good job on her, but I guess we didn't either, based on her production. So I mean that with affection for Jessica, certainly, when I say that."
In the last two games of the Tournament alone - both against top ten opponents - Breland hit more than double the field goals (24) than she had in the four-game losing streak that ended the regular season (10). She outscored herself in that four-game stretch (22 points total) in the Miami game alone (28 points), and in the Duke game (27 points), for that matter. She had 18 rebounds in the final four games of the regular season and 17 in the final two games of the ACC Tournament alone (27 for the Tournament).
The last Duke game was a springboard for this team into the ACC Tournament. They lost that night in Cameron Indoor Stadium, but they showed a toughness and a fight they hadn't had. They have their swagger back now, as Italee Lucas said in the postgame tonight. Maybe this Duke loss can be a starting point not only for Breland's resurgence but also for the team reaching its potential. "I'm just ready for the next Tournament," Breland said. "Hopefully we're all on the same page and we just go out there and do what we did in this Tournament and just fight for it."
Lauren Brownlow is the executive editor of Tar Heel Monthly.
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