Duke’s roster this season boasts five freshmen out of its eleven members, but if that sounds like a lot, just wait until UT-Martin comes to town.
Head coach Kevin McMillan leads a squad featuring a remarkable 10 freshmen into Cameron Indoor Stadium Saturday at 1:30 p.m., as his 15th-seeded Skyhawks (21-10) take on the second-seeded Blue Devils (29-3) in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
UT-Martin clinched its first-ever NCAA Tournament bid by upsetting Tennessee Tech in the Ohio Valley Conference tournament championship game March 5. The postseason berth is just another step in the school’s ascent in the women’s basketball world: The school has risen from the NAIA to Division I, joining the OVC in 1992. Its coach is also new to the college scene, as he is just two years removed from winning a Tennessee state title as a high school coach.
McMillan’s early recruiting efforts have been prolific to say the least. Of the 15 players listed on the Skyhawks’ roster, there are just two upperclassmen: senior guard Alecia Weatherly and junior guard Taylor Hall. Weatherly and Hall are two of seven players to have scored over 100 points for UT-Martin; the other five are freshmen.
Once he had his parade of recruits in the door, McMillan didn’t go easy on them. He opened the season with a brutal month-long, 10-game road trip that saw the Skyhawks accumulate five of their ten losses on the season while visiting teams like Colorado, Missouri and Vanderbilt. The team didn’t play a home game until Dec. 19, at which point Duke had already played in Cameron five times.
For the Skyhawks, two more losses would come before the New Year, again on the road, to Louisville and then-No. 11 Kentucky. Once the calendar turned over to 2011, though, UT-Martin won 14 of 17, with one of those losses being a three-point overtime defeat at Eastern Illinois. The Skyhawks haven’t lost by double digits in more than two months, and their early-season exploits against teams from power conferences ensure that despite their youth, they won’t be fazed by the prospect of facing Duke.
UT-Martin’s scoring efforts are, not surprisingly, led by two freshmen who both average over 17 points per game. Guard Heather Butler, who played for McMillan for two years in high school, is the nation’s top-scoring freshman at 19.1 points per contest.
Her willingness to shoot from the outside is noteworthy. She attempted a remarkable 229 3-pointers on the season; by comparison, Jasmine Thomas led Duke with 142 attempts from long range. Butler made 83 of her attempts, but she wasn’t the only one shooting treys, as UT-Martin finished second in the nation in made threes per game, with 8.9. Though the Blue Devils as a team took about 100 more shots than the Skyhawks overall, Butler and her teammates shot nearly 300 more 3-pointers.
Head coach Joanne P. McCallie mentioned some of the things that her team has been working on in order to defend UT-Martin’s perimeter attack.
“Obviously getting over screens and being aggressive on the contest,” she said. “And then the interesting thing is the long rebounds that pop off. We’re really trying to take advantage of a long rebound to get down the floor and score.”
Jasmine Newsome is McMillan’s other star freshman. Though shy of Butler’s scoring mark at 17.8 points per game, Newsome also pulls down 4.4 rebounds per game and dishes out 4.1 assists.
With two obvious scoring threats in Newsome and Butler, McCallie emphasized the need to defend go-to scorers.
“We let [North Carolina forward Jessica] Breland get away with 28 points in [the ACC] championship game, and I don’t like that,” McCallie said. “We need to do a better job in our overall team defense of recognizing a hot hand and shutting it down. And of course both [Butler and Newsome] qualify for that.”
Six-foot-tall Jaclissa Haislip is listed as a guard on the team’s roster, but she rebounds like a forward, chipping in 8.2 boards per game in addition to being the team’s third-leading scorer at 9.2 points per game.
But when an opponent’s leading rebounder is six feet tall, there are likely to be opportunities for Duke’s two 6-foot-5 centers Krystal Thomas and Allison Vernerey.
If the Blue Devils can capitalize on their size advantage in the paint and contest UT-Martin’s barrage of 3-pointers, the up-and-coming Skyhawks will be hard-pressed to pull off an upset. The Blue Devils can’t just count on their Tournament familiarity to win the game for them, though, since 3-pointers from freshmen count the same as those made by seniors. It’ll up to the Blue Devils to prove that experience does matter.
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