A resilient Tribe (6-4) powered past No. 72 Elon 6-1 at the McCormack-Nagelson Tennis Center on Sunday afternoon. The win snapped a three-game losing streak and helped the College bounce back from a loss there against East Tennessee State on Friday.

“That was the toughest 6-1 match I have ever been a part of,” Head Coach Peter Daub said. “It took four hours and 40 minutes to complete and each team really gave it their all.”

The Tribe began the day by taking two of three doubles matches. Junior Sebastien Vidal and freshman Jamie Whiteford improved to a perfect 5-0 on the year with an 8-4 triumph at the no. two position, while redshirt freshman Daniel Mihalov and sophomore Ilija Orre earned their second victory of the season.

In singles play, vocal leader and top player Keziel Juneau dropped a frustrating first set to Phillip Nemec, 5-7. But the Montreal-native battled back and eventually clinched the first singles victory of the afternoon.

“I knew I could beat [Nemec],” Juneau said. “He’s from Canada and I had played him before.”

Vidal, playing in the no. two spot, also dropped the initial set, but eventually settled in to take the next two sets 7-6 (2) and 6-4.

“I wasn’t playing great, but everything came slowly back,” Vidal said. “Sometimes wins aren’t perfect.”

Sophomore Ilija Orre fought a marathon battle in the no. 5 spot against Elon’s Carlos Arboledo. The match, which ran several hours, finally ended when Orre won consecutive games. Other singles wins were notched by freshmen Anton Andersson and Adrian Vodislav.

“All 12 players were warriors out there and gave all they had,” Daub said. “Both teams played at a high level, and we were fortunate enough to come out on top.”

On Friday, the Tribe was edged 5-4 by 60th ranked East Tennessee State. The doubles matches were tightly contested, but the Buccaneers outlasted the Tribe, taking two of the three, 9-8 and 8-6.

Juneau and Vidal each tallied victories in singles improving their records to 14-6 and 16-6, respectively. Vodislav also added a come-from-behind victory in the No. 6 spot, but it was not enough for the win.

The College hosts James Madison University at 10 a.m. this Saturday.

With her first block against UNC-Wilmington, Tribe forward Tiffany Benson inscribed her name forever into the CAA record books as the conference’s all-time blocks leader.

Otherwise, it was a forgettable afternoon Sunday for the College, as William and Mary (10-10, 3-6) fell to UNC-Wilmington 69-59 at Kaplan arena.

Benson’s record-setting rejection came with 16:19 remaining in the first half, as the senior forward swatted away a Whitney Simmons shot from just outside the lane. The block gave Benson 237 blocks for her career, moving her ahead of former George Mason forward Trish Halpin on the all-time conference list.

“It’s an amazing accomplishment. I’ve never had a player here do that, become number one in the CAA,” Head Coach Debbie Taylor said. “To have a William and Mary player number one all time in the CAA speaks loudly and I am just really proud of her.”
Benson, who would record another block later in the contest, recorded her sixth double-double of the season Sunday, scoring 12 points to go along with 15 rebounds in the losing effort.

The rest of the afternoon Sunday would prove less memorable for the Tribe, as the College committed 22 turnovers and shot 30 percent from the field in the second half against the Seahawks.

The team’s leading scorer on the season, sophomore guard Taysha Pye, did not enter the game until the 16:09 mark of the second half. Despite only seeing 16 minutes of action, Pye led all scorers with 17 points.

“[Pye] was horrible in the last game. She didn’t deserve to play,” Taylor said. “She was a much better player than she had been playing and obviously you can see what she can do when she wants to play.”

Sophomore guard Janine Aldridge was the only other College player to score in double figures, racking up 10 points despite going 4-for-16 from the field, 2-for-12 from behind the three-point line.

The Tribe’s inability to put the ball in the basket, coupled with the team’s turnovers, allowed UNC-Wilmington to come out of the gate strong in the second half, as the Seahawks started the half on a 10-2 run.

The College would cut the lead to eight on a Pye jumper with 1:30 remaining in the game, but would get no closer, going 1-for-4 from the field in the last minute and a half of the game.

“Our problem right now is that we’re getting inconsistent play from good players” Taylor said about losing their last six of eight. “Everybody needs to bring to the table what they can bring every night. We’ve got a long way to go and I still feel like we are a very good team.”

For a final box score, click here.

Describe Taysha Pye’s game in one word.

One word? Powerful.

Wait, powerful is not strong enough. Crashing, jarring, punishing. Pye loves contact. Her game is contact. You know how they say great players can call their move beforehand yet still execute it anyway? Pye’s move is contact.

“It’s almost animalistic,” Channel Murchison, Pye’s teammate and roommate, said. “It’s almost something we all wish we were capable of doing. We all play basketball, we all are shooters but man, to have that much body control is amazing.”

Amazing and effective. In the 24 games she has started in her William and Mary career, Pye has scored under double-figures only three times. She leads the Tribe in scoring this season, averaging 14.8 points per game. She’s shooting 46 percent from the field.

Last season, Pye dropped 30 on James Madison without taking a single three-pointer. Her game plays at the top of the CAA — she was named to the CAA All-Rookie team last season — and she’s only a sophomore.

Since high school, Pye has been able to drive past defenders at will. It was this skill that attracted Head Coach Debbie Taylor to Pye when she was at St. Anne’s Belfield in Charlottesville, Va, where Pye had transferred after her freshman year of high school.

“To be honest, we didn’t really think we would have a shot at her,” Taylor said. “Early on in the process, she was getting some looks from some pretty big schools; West Virginia, I believe, was interested in her. It was a thing where we learned late that no one had signed her, and her grades weren’t great, so when she got her grades up in the second semester, we went after her.”

Perhaps the best way to describe Pye’s game is to say that it comes from her father, Maurice. It was her father who first made Taysha start playing with the boys, a strategy born as much out of necessity as any other factor.

You see, when Pye was five years old, her mother, Darala, passed away from breast cancer, leaving Maurice to raise Taysha and her older brother Maurice Jr. all by himself.

“It was tough. That’s the reason my father and I are so close,” Pye said. “When I was that age, I actually felt like it really didn’t hit me. I didn’t really start thinking about it until I started coming of age and I was like, wow, I lost my mother.”

In charge of both kids after his wife’s death, Maurice started bringing Taysha to the park as he went through drills with her brother.

“When we were younger, he’d be doing drills with my older brother in the park and I’d be like ‘Daddy, can I try,’” Pye said. “He was just like, ‘Come on girl, go finish playing in the park.’ Then he finally saw me playing and was like ‘wow,’ and that’s when I started running around with my brother. I eventually just stopped playing with my friends all together.”

Eventually, Pye started playing only in pick-up games with her brother and his friends, instilling the aggressive, contact-driven game she plays today. Even though Maurice has only seen Pye play once in her college career, to this day he can listen to her over the radio and still picture her as clearly as if she were still playing in front of him on a blacktop in the Bronx.

“He hasn’t actually been to any of my games this year, but I actually talked to him last night after the game and he talked about the game as if he had seen every game for the whole season,” Pye said. “He talked to me like he was Coach Taylor. He told me ‘You need to not go to the rim so much. You need to start pulling up,’ which is exactly what Coach Taylor told me at halftime.”

All this is not to say that Maurice was ever totally able to replace Darala. Pye is still reminded of her mother from time to time, often in the little things which go unnoticed by those yet to experience such a loss.

“I feel it when I see people’s relationship with their mothers like my friends. Even my friends here, they all do stuff with their mothers and I just don’t have that, which is fine,” Pye said. “I’m happy with my family and I know she’s in a better place and I’ve come to terms with it.”

It has helped that over the last two years, Pye has grown close to her two roommates, Murchison and sophomore guard Janine Aldridge, and their respective families.

“I could see it being a little hard on her, but when ever our parents come to town, we always bring her along” Murchison said. “For both of our parents, Taysha knows that pretty much anything she wants from them, she can have it.”

Today, in addition to her older brother, Pye has three brothers, Max, 14, Ryan, 8, and Dylan, 3, as well as two sisters, Shylah, 15, and Asheree, 14. All of them are basketball players, even Dylan, who has already destroyed many a child-sized hoop in the Pye household.

For Pye’s family, basketball is the love which unites them, making Pye’s game as much a game of love as it is a game of contact. For it was basketball which her father gave her, and it was basketball which kept her family together.

“He just kept the family together and kept us all together and kept a loving family,” Pye said. “When you get through something like that, that’s really all you need. You just need to be loved.”

Returning home in the midst of a momentum-sapping, three-game losing streak, the College knew that it badly needed a win to remain in the picture at the top of a highly competitive CAA. And 39 minutes into a crucial, back-and-forth game with Drexel (12-11, 7-4 CAA), the College was not going to give that win away.

William and Mary (15-6, 7-4 CAA) sank four free throws in the final minute to ice an intense, foul-ridden contest, prevailing with a 54-51 win in a game that contained crucial applications for both squads. Drexel guard Shannon Givens’ attempt at a tying three-pointer at the final buzzer clanked harmlessly off the front iron.

“It was a great win,” Head Coach Tony Shaver said. “Today, we needed a good performance as much as a win.”

Despite poor shooting totals and 10 turnovers, the College got both. Facing one of the CAA’s toughest defenses and hottest teams, the Tribe overcame a 12 of 46 night from the field by sinking 28 of 37 free throws. On an afternoon in which the whistle blew early and often, the College repeatedly challenged the Drexel press and was rewarded by getting to the line.

“We started with a lot of intensity,” senior guard David Schneider said. “Coach took us aside before the game started and told us to be the aggressor. Especially when shots weren’t falling, I thought we did a great job of getting to the line.”

After averaging 30 three-point attempts a game over its last three losses, the Tribe came out of the locker room determined to work the ball inside. The squad’s 15 three-point tries marked their second-fewest total of the season – and they made only two of those shots.

“We didn’t get a lot of good looks today, a lot because of their defense,” Schneider said. “They did a great job of taking away the three, especially.”

But the College made up for that void with a furious defensive effort that belied the importance of the contest. The Tribe got 18 points off of 15 Drexel turnovers, while holding the Dragons to 38.8 percent shooting overall. Drexel also shot a futile 9-22 from the free throw line for the contest.

That, combined with the Tribe’s marksmanship at their own stripe, combined to put an end to the College’s midseason slump and supply the squad with a crucial win entering the stretch run.

The victory brought the Tribe back into the top-four of the conference – necessary for a vital first-round bye in the CAA tournament – and left them holding an important tiebreaker over Drexel and VCU.

“The biggest thing is keep winning, get a nice little streak going,” Schneider said.

Next up will be second-place Old Dominion, which defeated the College 58-55 Jan. 23 in Williamsburg.

Due to a weekend snowstorm that caused the contest against Drexel to be played Sunday instead of Saturday, the Tribe will now have one fewer day of rest before that matchup. They’ll also have less time to prepare.

“We have a short turnaround for Old Dominion,” Shaver said. “We’ve got to prepare to handle their zone. They’re number one in the country defensively. It’s such a big lineup, so we’ve got to be better against their zone than we were last time and a little bit better defensively inside.”

The Flat Hat is live, courtside at Kaplan Arena as the College (14-6, 6-4 CAA) takes on Drexel (12-10, 7-3 CAA) in a crucial fight for playoff positioning. Tune in for play-by-play, commentary, analysis, and more.

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