Just the Facts, Ma'am: 25 points from Michelle Kurowski propelled UMBC to a 75-55 win over Brown in the consolation game of the Iona Thanksgiving Classic. Meghan Colabella added a double-double of 10 points and 11 rebounds for the Retrievers. Lauren Clarke had 11 to lead the Bears, with Aileen Daniels chipping in 10 points and seven rebounds.
For travelogues, crisp ball movement, and the perils of sitting at midcourt, join your intrepid and belated blogger after the jump.
It's the most wonderful time of the year- not for the holidays and the Christmas lights that people are putting up entirely too early and the ever-increasing pressure to buy presents for people and the biting cold that cuts right through your jacket, but the time when the out of conference season really heats up, and teams take every opportunity to travel to new and exciting places that they might not have been before. I love holiday tournaments, don't you?
To get to Iona, you take Metro-North. (Or you drive. But if you're me, you take Metro-North because you don't have a driver's license and no one in their right mind drives in New York.) You're on the New Haven line, which will eventually take you to exciting places in Connecticut if you forget to get off the train. It's not the prettiest of the Metro-North lines- that's the Hudson line, which Billy Joel sang about and which will take you up to Poughkeepsie and Marist if you're so inclined. But once you get past the warehouses and grim apartment buildings of the Bronx, it's a pretty enough ride. New Rochelle is about an hour on the train, and from the station, it's a curvy little cab ride up to the campus. Possibly, it's walkable, but walking involved freezing off bits of myself that I rather like, so I opted for a cab.
The layout of the arena is a bit odd- the gym isn't properly connected to the rest of the athletics center, so you have to go through the basement if you want to get around anywhere. There are small details to the gym itself that I like- the "IONA" in white on the bleacher seats so that even if there's no one there the school spirit becomes clear, the stat board in the back corner that updates team stats in real time, the detailed graphic board that shows player stats when a player is at the free throw line. Of course, the hardest thing to argue with is the $5 ticket prices, even with $1 for the programs.
Brown did not impress me. Their coach was exceptionally slow with her subs, to the point where we were wondering what in the world she was doing in the Ivy League. Their defense reminded me of the middle-school games that you see at halftime- everyone went after the person with the ball. Against a moderately better team than UMBC, this is not going to work. Against UMBC, it worked for a while. We also weren't sure what in the world the coach was thinking with some of the sub patterns, especially in the second half when the game was out of reach- one minute she'd be bringing in the subs from the very end of the bench, the next she'd be calling them back and coming with the starters, almost like a head coach reading off the card for a two-point conversion- "Sure, it's a forty-point game, so the card says I should go for it." (Different numbers, obviously, because points mean different things in football and basketball, but you get the idea, right?)
Lindsay Steele was the first player off the bench in both halves, a guard who got into the mix a bit. We saw a little bit of everyone. The bench player who sticks out the most in my mind is freshman Jordin Juker, who played defense like she fantasizing about suiting up on the Smurf Turf back in Boise and played offense like she never saw a shot she didn't like. Her aggression and assertiveness will serve her well, but she's not going to have a lot of friends on the other teams in the Ivy. I remember thinking that there was a lot of head-desky moments for Carly Wellington.
Lauren Clarke likes to shoot a little bit. It seemed like every time she had the ball in the frontcourt, she was getting ready to put up another three. To be fair to her, UMBC left her embarrassingly open sometimes- we're talking about having enough time to step into the three, not just release it quickly. Aileen Daniels was a name that stuck in my head from the last time I saw Brown, and she has a nice presence inside, even if she couldn't hit a free throw to save her life. I don't think this was her best game, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear about her having good games in the Ivy League season. Sheila Dixon tried to pull off a lot of fancy moves that neither she nor her team were properly prepared for. Nice vertical, though. If the over-the-shoulder pass had gone to someone that could hit a lay-up, I might have remarked on that as one of the best plays of the day. It was reminiscent of Ticha Penicheiro. Lindsay Nickel sort of disappeared until the second half, though that had a bit to do with foul trouble. Hannah Passafulme came on in the second half, with a nice block and a pretty shot on a feed from Daniels.
UMBC didn't like to go to their subs until late in the half- they went almost the entire first quarter (or reasonable facsimile thereof, as I'm aware college games don't use the quarter system) with their starters. I liked what I saw out of Amirah Tucker in garbage time, and Kristen Coles was a useful guard. Chelsea Barker was good as a reserve point guard, though sometimes she thought too much about her own offense.
Where we were sitting (center court, about six rows up) was very neutral ground, though contested might be closer. Behind us was a family of Brown fans. In front of us was a contingent from Montclair. My wild guess is that they were there for the kid from Upper Montclair, Meghan Colabella. She started off well, but she faded later in the game. Erin Brown came up with the shots when they needed them. Tope Obajolu did a great job of rebounding and coming up with the loose ball, but she couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if you spotted her an extra barn to aim for. Michele Brokans spent a lot of the game in foul trouble, and she did a nice job of staying out of it once she got the fourth foul. The player who impressed me for the Retrievers was Michelle Kurowski. I'm not just talking about the way she shredded Brown's defense. Her court vision was well above par. She kept the ball movement going smoothly.
I was sort of disappointed in the referees. I'm starting to think that points of emphasis are much more of a guide than the NCAA planned for them to be- the officials seemed more worried about calling travels and slight contact than they were about some of the more heavy-duty contact that was going on.
Things that impressed me about UMBC: ball movement. A positive A/TO is a lovely thing to see in a basketball game. In a depleted America East, they might make some noise.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
November 28th, 2010: Brown at UMBC (Iona Thanksgiving Classic)
Friday, November 27, 2009
November 27th, 2009: Brown at Long Island (LIU Turkey Classic)
Long Island University Blackbirds 68, Brown Bears 55
Brown is a bit confused, LIU puts the pieces together, and teamwork is of the good.
The day after Thanksgiving, some people like to sleep off the turkey and the overindulgence. Some people prefer to indulge in greed on the heels of their gluttony.
The Game Notes of Doom prefer basketball as their vice, so we were off to LIU for the Turkey Classic. LIU's cute little arena and New York location (one stop away from Manhattan!) do a pretty good job in drawing schools that usually wouldn't deign to visit an NEC team, both in terms of class and in terms of location; the second game in the Classic was Seton Hall and Georgia Tech. I thought it was very realistic of LIU to put themselves in the first game, knowing that Seton Hall would probably be bringing a lot of people (in relative terms) for the second game.
Signs you are at an NEC arena: the musical options were "Black Classic iPod with rap/hip-hop" and "Blue Nano iPod with Top 40 hits". The blue nano won the day, and we ended up hearing "Paparazzi" six times and "Disturbia" four (and it would have been more if we hadn't finally let the guy in charge know that enough was enough, because while I like "Disturbia", hearing it four times in three hours is much of a muchness).
Anthem was tolerable, except for one egregiously bad horn player who needed to be taken out into the parking lot and thwacked with a stick with nails in. What's up with the holding-hands-during-the-anthem trend? FAIL.
Did you know the mayor of Baltimore played for Brown? No, I think this was a different Sheila Dixon; no one would be fucking with her if this were she. Brown uses a lot of line changes in the mold of Charli Turner Thorne, so a lot of people rotated back and forth. I sort of felt bad for Taylor Masaschi, who ended up being the eleventh woman sitting forlornly on the bench while five played on the floor and five waited at the scorer's table. Aileen Daniels was the first player to score for Brown, which took a while, which is why I remember it, because the bench opened the scoring. Christina Johnson sort of wants to be Kristi Toliver when she grows up, which isn't necessarily a good thing. She's good, but she seemed to be trying to do too much. The other reserves were unmemorable.
Natalie Bonds was really the only player on that team who seemed to be a legit player. She did nice work inside and worked on the boards. Hannah Passafuime looked like she was trying to work out some unresolved hostility. I'm sort of looking forward to their game against Columbia. Unresolved Hostility versus Ten Pounds of Crazy in a Two Pound Bag is gon' be good. The other starters didn't really impress me, though that may simply be because I'd not seen Brown before and it's always a little easier for me to keep an eye on a team if I've seen them before.
LIU already seems to be going deeper into their bench than they were two games ago, as I don't recall Kayla Ramsby playing in the Columbia game. I would have remembered a player who basically looked like a poor man's version of Deanna Nolan, not just in superficial physical appearance, but in speed and vertical leap. I like her. I like a lot of LIU's freshmen. Krystal Wells is a pretty solid young point guard with a good sense of the game. Tamika Guz has size and (at least in practice) hands like clamps; she just needs a little more wherewithal and some shooting lessons to be a real force on the inside. Ify Obianwu gave them some good minutes, and she's another player who saw very limited time in the Columbia game. Because it was such a blowout, we got to see MaryAnn Abrams, who couldn't buy a basket no matter how hard she tried but at least got a rebound, and Tessy Hetting, who moves very gracefully. Justine Stevenson needs to learn not to bring the ball down; if you're going to play the post, you never bring the ball down because the guards will go "OOOOH NEW TOY SHINY *grab*" and there will be a scrum. Marika Sprow's minutes were unimpressive, but whatever, she's still a fellow Liberty fan.
Heidi Mothershead sneaks up on you. I looked down at my clipboard at halftime and went "!!! Mothershead has 12 points! How the shit did that happen?" She had one wicked block that made us all go "ooooh!". Kiara Evans still needs to learn when not to shoot (for example, going one on three: don't shoot), but she rifled some passes to Chelsi Johnson that were things of beauty. Making things happen- always good. Johnson is rapidly becoming a favorite of mine, because she's a very communicative player and because she gets it done on the inside, plus that sweet little foul line jumper makes her a threat further out as well. Palmer looked a little winded before the game, and when she went down in a heap in the first half, I was a little worried (also, to the troglodyte behind me who complained because of the injury timeout, I must hope that you are not related to a Brown student, because otherwise I must assume that you have been cuckolded, because no one sired by a troglodyte would be able to get into an Ivy League school). Fortunately it looks like it was just her ankle, and not a severe injury; she spent part of halftime and a couple of timeouts running, presumably to keep it from getting stiff, and there was one long runout that pretty much proved that as long as she kept moving the ankle would be fine.
Pretty solid reffing crew. No real complaints here.
I really like Streigler's coaching style. She usually stays very calm, but always stays involved in the game, always keeps her players on their toes, and instills pretty good sportsmanship in her team. They're pretty good about having a hand to help an opponent up.
All in all, a deeply satisfying game. GNoD approved!