Around this time last year, a tiny bit of Brenda Frese was happy to see her Terrapin women’s basketball team headed not to the NCAA Tournament, but to the WNIT.
Frese craved success, as any warm-blooded Division I coach does, but she knew a ticket to the NCAA Tournament likely would mean a hastened expiration date for her team’s season. A trip to March’s second-biggest dance, meanwhile, gave her the opportunity to coach a young squad she loved teaching for just a little bit longer.
Sunday, Frese’s Terps will make a well-earned return trip to the field of 64. The joy is still there for Frese, as is the promise of the squad she leads. But what has to be most enthralling for coach and players alike is that regardless of what happens this weekend and beyond, next year can — and should — be even better.
Frese knew that to be true last year as her team limped into the WNIT, and it’s become obvious again this year, in both victory and defeat. Sure, there have been rough patches of youthful immaturity here and there — a mid-February home loss to a middling Virginia squad, for example, offered a harsh lesson in underestimating the opposition and underperforming in the clutch.
“We’ve been through [the season] now,” said junior guard Anjale Barrett, one of the elder statesmen on a team without any seniors, “so we know what it takes.”
But the highs have been oh-so-tantalizing. Not too many teams can blow out Duke or North Carolina by 20-plus points, as the Terps did inside Comcast Center earlier this season.
Unfortunately for the budding, fourth-seeded Terps, they’re on a collision course with one of the few that can. Should Frese and co. advance past fifth-seeded Georgetown after an expected beatdown of Saint Francis (Pa.) on Sunday, they’re all but guaranteed to face defending national champion Connecticut next weekend.
As good as Alyssa Thomas, the Terps’ do-everything freshman, has been this season, Huskie guard Maya Moore is in another stratosphere entirely. A loss to the Huskies, like last year’s trip to the NIT, would be just another milepost on the road back to national prominence. Progress doesn’t always move linearly, and the Terps would do well to realize that an end to this season — whenever it comes, against whomever it might be — will only mark the beginning of their next.
“I think you have to understand you can’t take anyone lightly,” Frese said. “We’ve got to do what we do best.”
That best, though, won’t come close to next year’s. And that’s certain to make the madness of March all the more tolerable for Frese this year.
shaffer@umdbk.com
