It’s been a long time since a Maryland women’s basketball team has entered any part of March as an underdog.
But the Terps, who began the season as a national title contender, will begin NCAA tournament play this Friday as more afterthought than favorite.
Maryland drew the No.4 seed in the Spokane region and a tough road to return to the Final Four for the first time in seven years. That road may include potential meetings with Stanford, the defending national champions, and Texas, the team that knocked them out of the tournament in the regional semifinals last year.
It’s a far cry from what was expected in November, but the Terps, who host Delaware, the 13-seed, Friday, are happy to have drawn a top-16 seed, which means the chance to host first and second round games, given what they’ve gone through.
“We’ve worked so hard through the adversity of injuries and illnesses this year and for us to be able to be hosting the first two rounds of the tournament. I’m really thrilled,” said Maryland coach Brenda Frese Sunday.
The Terps (21-8) will have been stewing in their 62-51 Big Ten tournament quarterfinal loss to Indiana for two full weeks before Friday and appear anxious to get back to work.
“This group of girls is really competitive, so every day in practice we’re still competing like we’re out there playing 40 minutes,” said graduate forward Chloe Bibby. “It’s a little bit hard, I think everyone’s a bit antsy. We just want to go out there and play.”
Maryland opened the season ranked No. 4 in the Associated Press poll and were tapped to win the Big Ten regular season. At the time, it seemed a fairly sensible choice given the Terps were returning their starting lineup and 10 players overall from a team that led the nation in scoring last year.
However, the Terps ran into a hail of injuries and ailments that doomed them to their worst Big Ten regular season and tournament outcomes since joining the league in 2014-15.
Benzan, who led the nation in three-point shooting last season, and junior perimeter player Diamond Miller, a first-team all Big Ten performer last year, missed a Thanksgiving showcase in the Bahamas with an unspecified ailment and a knee injury, respectively,
The Terps’ roster that weekend was reduced to seven players – two of them freshmen. Not surprisingly, they were drilled by Stanford, the defending national champions, and North Carolina State, which, like the Cardinal received a No.1 seed Sunday, during that lost weekend.
Later, key reserve forward Faith Masonius suffered an ACL tear in a loss to Indiana, while point guard Ashley Owusu, a preseason National Player of the Year candidate. missed four games late in the season with an ankle injury.
On top of it all, Frese’s father, Bill, died in February, throwing the coach and the team into a bit of a tailspin.
“We’ve been through a lot this season, so many obstacles,” said sophomore forward Angel Reese (St. Frances). “We’ve hit adversity so many times — playing with just seven players, without Coach some games. So, we’ve seen it all, and I think we’re gonna be ready and that’s why we’re so focused on this weekend, just playing one game at a time. So I think we’ll be ready for Friday.”
The Terps have struggled to maintain offensive consistency all season, averaging 78 points per game, a full 12 points below last year’s 90 points per game, the best in the nation.
But with 14 days of rest and practice, Maryland hopes to find an elixir for the underdog blues.
“We’ve won 8 of our last 10 games, we’re on a roll,” said Benzan. “Although our journey ended early in Indianapolis, I feel good.”
The Blue Hens (24-7) finished second in the Colonial Athletic Association regular season, but beat top-seed Drexel 63-59 in the tournament final Sunday to claim the league’s automatic bid.
Senior Jasmine Dickey (Catonsville), who averaged a double-double this season, posted a 27-point, 18-rebound performance in the CAA title game.
The Maryland-Delaware winner meets the winner of the Virginia Tech-Florida Gulf Coast first-round game Sunday, also in College Park.
Sports Media Analyst
Milton Kent is a veteran of Baltimore and Maryland journalism. Kent began a long association with the Baltimore Sun in 1985, serving as the Evening Sun’s Howard County reporter for 2 ½ years before joining the paper’s features department as an entertainment writer in 1988. In the following year, Kent began covering men’s and women’s college basketball for the Evening Sun, concentrating on the Maryland men’s and women’s teams. He continued covering college basketball when the writing staffs of the Evening and Morning Suns merged in 1991. From there, he covered the Orioles for three seasons before becoming one of the nation’s first fulltime sports media critics for parts of six years. In 2000, he began covering the NBA until 2004, when he launched a high school sports column, which he wrote until he left the Sun in 2008. Kent joined the staff of AOL Fanhouse, an online sports operation in 2009, covering sports media and women’s basketball, until operations ceased in 2011. He then joined the faculty at Morgan State University in the fall of 2011, where he has taught until the present day. In addition to writing for various platforms, including Sports Illustrated.com and TV Guide, Kent has hosted “Sports At Large,” a weekly commentary program airing on WYPR (88.1 FM) since 2002.