Role players spark Blue Devils to Sweet victory

Like a dime store knockoff of an Agatha Christie novel, Duke women's basketball is getting to be a little formulaic: You're pretty sure you know how it's going to end, there's just the simple matter of whodunit.

On a team of role players, it's a star a night for this Duke team, but for head coach Gail Goestenkors, it's a twice-told tale she doesn't mind hearing one more time.

There's the usual suspect of course, ACC player of the year Georgia Schweitzer, and with 25 points Schweitzer didn't disappoint her top billing. But even Schweitzer had her hero for the night.

"I wanna be like Sheana," the usually reserved Schweitzer said of freshman Sheana Mosch.

Then again, somewhere in the middle of a 25 point outburst, so did a lot of people.

Getting the No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament had been Goestenkors' Julia Child special-a tricky combination of mixing role players and subs with two proven stars and not much else. Punching the ticket to the third straight Sweet 16 were Mosch and Rochelle Parent.

The two had gotten just enough press to fill the safety brochure on the Titanic this season, but when Sheana Mosch the reserve and Rochelle Parent the defensive stopper had to become the stars last night, they took to it like it was the role they played all season.

"That's the great thing about this team," Goestenkors said. "Every night, somebody different can step up."

Immediately afterwards, Parent made her first big play of the night, ripping a defensive rebound out of the hands of a crowd of red jerseys beneath the Lady Topper basket and sending the ball up court.

Fittingly enough, it was Mosch who finished what Parent had started.

Sophomore Krista Gingrich fed the ball ahead to Mosch in transition, who sliced through the middle of the lane, picking up a foul from Katie Wulf and banging home the layup for the second of two three-point plays on the night.

But it wasn't just the career 25-point night that Mosch was about to have, a night that eclipsed her old high total by nine points, it was her ability to make Duke's transition game lethal.

"She's playing her best basketball right now," Goestenkors said. "She's feeling very comfortable with when she should take the ball to the basket, when she should pull it out, when she should move it.

"Tonight she made great decisions with the basketball."

And then there was Parent, a player who is to the Blue Devils' intensity level what Alan Greenspan is to the nation's economy.

With Western Kentucky on an 8-2 run to start the half, and with the suddenly hapless Blue Devils stumbling to an 0-for-7 five minute stretch to open the second half, the junior forward-who had played a rare foul-less half of basketball in the first-finally pointed Duke down the road to victory.

With 15:28 to play and Duke up just a point at 41-40, Parent corralled a Mosch miss in a crowd of Lady Toppers and powered up the putback for Duke's first field goal of the half.

And from there the Blue Devils never looked back.

The Akron, Ohio, junior controlled the glass for the next five minutes of the game, pulling down six of her game-high 11 rebounds during the stretch, and keeping ShaRae Mansfield, the Lady Toppers high scorer with 21, out of the game as the Blue Devils raced to a 56-44 advantage that all but sealed the game.

"[Parent] just took over the game with her rebounding and her defensive intensity; she took us to a new level," Goestenkors said. "She was our warrior. She's our MVP tonight. She didn't have the most points, but she made all the hustle plays and took us to a new level defensively."

And she put a stamp on the Blue Devils' third consecutive second round win that was distinctly hers, distinctly Mosch's and distinctly Duke.