Last weekend, William and Mary women’s basketball (10-15, 7-7 CAA) fell at home to conference foes North Carolina Agricultural and Technical (16-9, 12-2 CAA) and Charleston (18-6, 9-4 CAA), extending the team’s losing streak to a season-high of four games. The Tribe, once among the top teams in the Coastal Athletic Association standings, has now sunken into a three-way tie for sixth place in the league. With one game remaining in the month, the Green and Gold’s February record stands at 1-5.
“We have three key pillars for our program: show up, work hard, and pivot,” head coach Erin Dickerson Davis said after the NC A&T loss. “I feel like we’ve had to do a lot of pivoting this year, and I think that that’s something that we’ve done very well, whether it be because of injury, or this week we couldn’t practice because of the weather, or whatever, and we pivot.”
“But the ‘show up’ and the ‘work hard’ are two pillars that I don’t feel like we’re reaching right now in these last couple of games,” she added. “I think we won some early in conference, and I think after that we just kind of relaxed, and I’m just trying to figure out a way to get us back to those two pillars.”
Dickerson Davis’ comments came in the wake of a lopsided Friday, Feb. 21 defeat at Kaplan Arena in which the first-place Aggies took down the Tribe 67-44. William and Mary never held a lead and made just 24.6% of its 61 field goal attempts and 20% of its 25 three-point attempts. Only thrice in the last decade has the Green and Gold posted a worse single-game field goal percentage.
The Tribe’s shooting woes were not apparent in the first quarter when it connected on 40% of its three-point attempts and used a last-second jumper from senior guard Bella Nascimento to enter the break trailing just 16-13. The game took a turn for the worse after that: William and Mary made just three field goals during an ugly second quarter in which it was outscored 19-7.
“In the second quarter—I don’t know,” Dickerson Davis said. “I would love to say it was fatigue, but we only practiced one time this week, so it absolutely could not have been fatigue. So I don’t know what happened in the second quarter. I’m just going to have to go back and watch it and see where we could have adjusted a little bit better.”
The Green and Gold lost further ground in the third period when it made zero of its seven three-point attempts and fell behind 55-30. Although William and Mary managed to outscore its opponent in the fourth quarter, it was too late and NC A&T cruised to a 23-point victory.
Dickerson Davis was critical of the Tribe’s offensive performance, specifically noting the struggles of leading scorers Nascimento and sophomore guard Cassidy Geddes, who combined to make six of 26 field goal attempts.
“We need to scout, and I care about [scouting],” she said. “However, that’s not the issue right now. The issue is that we can’t score. We dealt with this early in the season, too, not being able to score. We can try to defend all we want, but if you’re defending and not scoring it’s hard to keep playing defense at that level. You just kind of get discouraged.”
“So tomorrow has to be spent all on offense,” she added. “That’s what we did all shoot around today. We didn’t even go over the A&T scout in shootaround today because it didn’t matter what they ran. We need to be able to score the basketball. Bella [Nascimento] has to be able to shoot better than 4-15. We can’t win when she scores nine points. Cassidy [Geddes] can’t be 2-11. This is just the reality.”
Sunday, Feb. 23, the Tribe returned to Kaplan Arena to take on Charleston, another CAA elite. The team’s focus on offensive improvement was immediately evident: William and Mary outscored the Cougars 23-11 in the first quarter, with Nascimento erupting for ten points and junior forward Kayla Rolph chipping in five.
“I saw a response to a challenge,” Dickerson Davis said of the Tribe’s first-quarter performance. “This is something that I know that we can do, which I think is why it was so frustrating when we were not playing that way. We sat down as a team yesterday, we had a problem-solving war room as opposed to an aggressive war room, and I think that that was very helpful. It helped us have a goal, and it was little things.”
“It wasn’t points, it was how many celebrations can we have every single quarter? When things start to go bad, how are we picking people up? Do we have positive touches? Are we hitting the open person? Are you picking people up when things go wrong? I think that was probably the biggest difference between Friday’s game and today’s game: we played together.”
However, the Tribe’s early run of form quickly dissipated. For the second consecutive game, a lopsided second quarter turned the tables against the Green and Gold, as Charleston outscored the hosts 29-12 during the frame. The Cougars forced seven William and Mary turnovers and drew two whistles against Nascimento, who would be saddled with foul trouble for the remainder of the afternoon. The Tribe entered the locker room trailing 40-35.
On the other side of the break, Nascimento and Rolph brought their team back into the game. In the third quarter alone, the former poured in eight points, while the latter made two three-pointers, a jumper, and a layup, making the score 63-61.
“I think I just had some open threes, so [I took] my time, [set] my feet,” Rolph, who finished the night with 21 points to tie a career-high, said. “My teammates were hitting me. I feel like once I saw the ball go in the basket that really helped, and then my teammates just kept feeding me and telling me to shoot it. Coach E kept telling me to shoot it. So [I] just shot it, and it went in.”
Amidst these third quarter efforts, however, Nascimento picked up her third and fourth fouls. Close to fouling out, she was a non-factor down the stretch, playing only three minutes in the final period. Geddes made a valiant effort to carry the offensive burden by herself, scoring eight points and grabbing three rebounds during the fourth quarter, but a late 7-2 Charleston run buried the Tribe.
Although the Green and Gold put up 76 points on the night, marking substantial progress from the NC A&T game, it came up one bucket short. However, Dickerson Davis took an optimistic tone in her postgame presser, lauding her squad’s togetherness and hustle.
“What we do is not rocket science,” she said. “The teams that play together, the teams that play hard usually are the teams that are successful. [There are] a couple of minor adjustments that we need to make, but I’ll take a loss like this any day over a loss where I feel like we’ve quit.”
“I think everybody’s morale is very high, and that is all that I can ask for coming off of three really heartbreaking games,” she added. “Starting with the [Feb. 14] Drexel game, everybody was heartbroken, everybody was literally spiraling downhill. And then you get to the [Feb. 16] Delaware [game], which is a hot team right now, but also to play a team like that after the demoralizing [Drexel] loss was very difficult. Then you come back with number one [North Carolina A&T].”
“Going into this weekend is senior night. We really want to represent our seniors and also our juniors that are graduating in three years, which we have two of this season. To be able to play for the people that have put so much time in, I think we can all really just find togetherness in that, I think we can find fight in that and really just send them off with a positive note.”
The Tribe will look to break its losing streak Friday, Feb. 28, when it takes on last-place Northeastern (2-21, 1-13 CAA) at Kaplan Arena in Williamsburg, Va. William and Mary will continue its conference schedule with a Sunday, March 2 Senior Day game against 12th place Hofstra (10-15, 5-9 CAA).
