For the Maryland women’s basketball team, Wednesday’s second round meeting with Alabama will be like looking in a mirror.
Not only will a group of Terps hoopsters face the Crimson Tide for chance to go to the Sweet 16 – two days after the men’s teams met under similar circumstances Monday – but they’ll see something very familiar.
Alabama, the No.7 seed in the HemisFair region, got by North Carolina Monday 80-71 with strong guard play, which was the hallmark of second-seeded Maryland’s 98-45 blitzing of Mount St. Mary’s.
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Alabama’s Jordan Lewis nearly notched a triple-double with a career-high 32 points, along with 11 rebounds and seven assists. Her backcourt mate, Hannah Barber scored 14. The pair combined to shoot 8-for-14 from three-point range.
Meanwhile, Maryland’s Ashley Owusu also had a near triple-double with 22 points, seven assists and eight rebounds. Her perimeter partner, Diamond Miller, had 19 points and the duo teamed to hit half their three-pointers, albeit a more modest 2-for-4.
The two teams are light on NCAA experience, as Alabama (17-9) won its first tournament game in 22 years Monday, while the players on Maryland’s roster participated in their initial NCAA game since coming to College Park.
The similarities do start to run out here. The Crimson Tide finished in the middle of the Southeastern Conference and have dropped three of their last five. They struggled to put away the Tar Heels in a game that broke open late.
Lewis and forward Jasmine Walker, both seniors, form a solid inside-outside duo. Both were named to the All-SEC first team and may present Maryland a solid challenge
The Terps (25-2) continued to bulldoze their way through competition, winning their 14th straight, all by double digits.
After a slow start Monday, Maryland rocked the Mountaineers (17-7) with an 18-0 run early in the second quarter on the way to posting the largest victory margin by a Terps team – men’s or women’s – ever in an NCAA tournament game.
The Terps, whose 53-point pasting, was the biggest of any first-round women’s game, will look to earn the school’s first berth in a regional semifinal since 2017, dropping their last two second-round games to UCLA (2019) and North Carolina State (2018).
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.