January 21st, 2008: Quinnipiac at St. Francis NY

The Terriers need to be hit with a cluestick, Connecticut fans are Connecticut fans no matter what school they follow, and there's just something disconcerting about a man of the cloth recognizing a New York Liberty t-shirt.


Our Grand Tour of New York basketball continued today in Brooklyn Heights, as we visited St. Francis for their game against Quinnipiac. Was quite a wander getting there from the train we were on; you'd be better off taking the M, R, 2, 3, 4, or 5, and not the A like we did. Even then, I'm still used to the concept of the gym being in a separate building, not in one of the main facilities, so we still almost missed it.

For lack of a more appropriate word, St. Francis really does play in a gym. Looks a little better than my high school gym, though take this with a grain of salt, because my school used an auxiliary gym that had a few inconveniently placed columns. Faded flag from a pole in the corner, sterile walls, cheap pads on said walls… clearly a facility for a school on the lower rungs of Division I. The seats were nice, though, being as they were actual seats. We didn't dare the concessions; if you have to go to the student cafeteria for your food, bring your own.

I will speak no ill of the anthem, because Brother Joe is a man of the full cloth and liked my 2000 Eastern Conference Champions shirt.

I really don't like Quinnipiac. Rough team, very rough, and the fans they brought along with them were downright obnoxious. Please not to be bitching about blatant calls on your team when you're up seventeen points with three minutes remaining, or thereabouts. If you want your team to stop being called for fouls, then tell your team to stop hacking, fair? For the Bobcats, senior forward Monique Lee played tough, and shooter Erin Kerner utterly went off in the second half. It got to the point where I was begging her not to score not just because I wanted St. Francis to have half a chance but also because I was running out of room to put points on my bootlegged scoresheet (bootleg in the sense that they didn't *have* scoresheets, and therefore I had to keep tallies on the program, although I stumbled upon a very nifty way of tracking first versus second half). The St. Francis coach just could not or would not adjust her defense, and Kerner burned the Terriers so badly that the ASPCA should have been put on the case. Quinnipiac just went on the attack in the second half, capitalized on every mistake St. Francis made, and made it clear that they were going to be the class of the league this year whether anyone liked it or not.

Frustration, ladies and gentlemen, is a six-eight Euro who can get after the ball like nobody's business but couldn't finish a shot if you gave her a guide to the basket. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if Katja Bavendam were on some German national team at some point in her career. Her countrywoman Karla Babica was a source of much frustration for anyone cheering on St. Francis; the Terriers committed nine fouls, and she had three of them. Her defense on Kerner was reminiscent of Yamasaki on Sales. I'm very surprised Tiffany Hill ended up at a school as low on the food chain as St. Francis- she's got real game, decent range, no fear, nice spin moves. I'm not saying she's a BEastie, but she should be in the MAAC or even the America East. But most of her points came late, after the Terriers had rolled over and played dead sufficiently- oh, the scoreboard only shows a fifteen-point swing, but St. Francis was down by more than twenty at some points; only the foul differential kept them respectable. If Deanna Petrucci had the courage to shoot, or perhaps a shot to shoot, she'd be pretty awesome- she's a scrapper, a rebounder, a playmaker, and a leader on the floor, but she's absolutely terrified to shoot, judging from what we saw today. She makes a good determined pair with Linda Warrington.

Honestly, I wore a Liberty shirt because it was the first clean and comfortable thing on the pile, and not because of the All-Star post tandem riding the bench for St. Francis. There were quite a few moments in that game where you could almost see Sue thinking, "I left Rutgers for THIS?!" Nothing seems to piss off an old-school Liberty player like giving up, and when St. Francis got lazy, Sue and Kym were both seething. At one point, Sue kicked a water bottle under her chair. (I'm sure the chair was thinking, "It could always be worse; look at my cousin in Indiana.") It looked like the two of them were doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the huddles, with Sue talking shop and Kym verbally going one on one with the players. I get the sneaking suspicion that the head coach will be around as long as they're mediocre, but as soon as they have a truly appalling season, she's out the door- assuming that Sue and Kym stick around there.

The thing that ticks me off, and the thing that I'm sure infuriated the folks at St. Francis, was that the Terriers pretty much controlled the first half. They were getting the shots they wanted, and they hadn't even gotten Hill going yet. But Quinnipiac started revving up at the end of the first half and just blew them out of the water in the second, and that's down to coaching, methinks. Time will tell if St. Francis can remedy that.