BC Bounces Back With Opening-Round WNIT Blowout of Maine
Andy Backstrom (@andybackstrom)
Publisher
Boston College women’s basketball senior guard Marnelle Garraud pressured Maine freshman Alba Orois. Garraud tipped Orois’ pass attempt and, in one movement, corralled the loose ball with her left hand while flinging it down the court.
Streaking along the left side of the floor was Cam Swartz.
Swartz, the ACC’s Most Improved Player of the Year, soared by a pair of Black Bears and caught up to Garraud’s heave as BC’s bench erupted in cheers.
She finished the fastbreak with a layup.
"I was like, 'Oh shoot!' It was three people going after the ball,” Dontavia Waggoner said. “I was like, 'She got this, she got this,' and she got it. And she got it."
Taylor Soule added: “It honestly felt like a movie. Like everything slowed down. Cam. And then the bench. And then it went in.”
Swartz, who struggled mightily in the Eagles’ second-round ACC Tournament loss to Florida State, didn’t make a field goal until the fourth quarter of Thursday night’s WNIT opener in Conte Forum. But she finished strong with a 3-pointer and that hustle play in the final frame.
And BC got that bad tournament taste out of its mouth with a 69-44 runaway victory over Maine.
Both teams weren’t far off from an NCAA Tournament appearance. BC (20-11, 10-8 ACC) was just on the wrong side of the bubble, whereas the Black Bears (20-12, 15-3 America East) were runner-ups in the America East after, at one point, winning 14 straight games and claiming the conference’s regular season championship.
As much as they had to prove Thursday night, neither squad made a bucket in the first two and a half minutes.
Eventually, though, Maine junior guard Anne Simon took matters into her own hands. Bringing down one of five Black Bear offensive rebounds in the first quarter, Simon creaked open the scoring gates. Maeve Carroll finished the job with a layup. Then Simon knocked down her first of two 3-pointers, the second of which put Maine up, 10-4.
After a couple Maria Gakdeng layups, Simon passed the keys to Caroline Bornemann. The sophomore from Denmark, who finished the first half with 15 points, orchestrated a self-made 8-2 run that staked the Black Bears to an 18-10 lead. That stretch featured a 3-pointer from the top of the arc and an offensive board that set the stage for an and-one layup.
Maine, which runs a Princeton-style offense, was working its backdoor cuts. That wasn’t surprising. What was head turning, however, was the fact that BC was outrebounded, 13-7, in the opening quarter, despite having a clear size advantage.
The Eagles were better on the glass in the second quarter. The real difference, though, was their defense. BC, which ended the first period on a 6-0 spurt, held Maine to 3-of-17 from the floor in the next frame.
“I thought the game was really decided in that second quarter,” Maine head coach Amy Vachon said.
Waggoner set the tone in the period’s infancy, prying the ball away from Bornemann and running the break to tie the game at 18-18.
Soon enough, a Kaylah Ivey 3-pointer jumpstarted an 18-5 BC scoring surge that ended the half. Soule, who piled up a game-high 21 points on 9-of-15 shooting, accounted for nine of the Eagles’ first 14 points during that momentum-shifting run.
BC took a 38-25 lead into the break and never looked back.
Maine didn’t make up any ground in the third quarter. Even though BC made only five field goals, the Black Bears merely matched that total on offense. Both teams committed five turnovers. Carroll reaching the 1,000-point mark with her low-post action was really the lone bright spot of the quarter for a Maine team that rounded out the night shooting 28.6%.
Just like the second period, BC held the Black Bears to seven points in the final frame. Ivey kicked off the quarter with a 3-pointer. Swartz and fellow senior Makayla Dickens also cashed in from long range in the period.
The Eagles shot a higher percentage from the field than they did at the line in the quarter, but it didn’t matter. They had already tipped the scale and started their climb through the WNIT bracket.
“For us this year, we didn’t just say postseason,” BC head coach Joanna Bernabei-McNamee said. “We said we want to go to the NCAA Tournament. So that was a goal that we had set all year long. When we still think we did enough to get there, and then we didn't get it, it could have been easy for these players, especially our older players, to just be down in the dumps and be like, 'Man, this isn't our year, and we're going to hang it up.' But I think I got the exact opposite.”
She continued: “It's been an emotional week, but I don't think our team has been this together since the start of the season.”
