Despite a tough loss to nationally ranked McMurry University in the championship game of the Guilford Tip-Off tournament on Nov. 18, the women’s basketball team has high hopes riding on some promising young talent. The Quakers’s 78-44 loss to McMurry came less than 24 hours after first-year Ann Seufer sank a school-record 8 three-pointers in the tournament semi-final against Bennett College. Guilford won a decisive 98-50 victory over Bennett in a magnificent offensive performance that had 5 players in double figures for the sixth-highest scoring game in school history.
But McMurry, led by All-American center and tournament MVP Tarra Richardson, responded to the Quakers’s lights-out shooting with an aggressive zone defense and a 56-24 advantage in rebounds.
“In some sense, the worst thing that could have happened to [Seufer] is that she broke the school record on the first night in college,” said Randy Doss, Vice President for Enrollment and avid fan of the team. “McMurry saw that and put their best defensive players on her, and tonight she’s just been shut down.”
The Quakers lost composure after McMurry shut them out for the first 5 minutes of the game. The team’s youthfulness may have contributed to their inability to close the gap.
Eight first years and 6 sophomores make up the youngest team the school has ever fielded. Dionne Graham, the Quakers’s captain and three-time letter winning point guard, sat out for the Game against McMurry due to injury.
In spite of the loss, Coach Stephanie Flamini is optimistic about the direction her young team is heading.
“I think we’re actually strong because we are so young. My girls are already very savvy players and there is a lot of room for growth,” Flamini said. “We’re also very balanced. In the past two years we’ve had only one or two people scoring for us. This year there are as many as ten players who can go out there and put up points.”
These wide-eyed first-years have the unusual opportunity-and challenge-to jump right in and play for one of Guilford’s most historically successful programs.
“Along with golf which has been a very successful team, I don’t know of another program that has won conference championships in this decade,” Doss said. “Women’s basketball has been a marquis sport here at Guilford-very important. We’d all like to see it get back to that level and I think that this team has the chance to make that kind of progress.”
The challenging transition for any student into college compounds the younger players’ difficult task of filling the shoes of championship teams.
Coach Flamini is actively involved in helping make this transition as smooth as possible. The team holds study hall three nights a week, mandatory for the first-years.
“We’re working hard to integrate their experience on campus,” Flamini said. “Basketball takes a lot of time, school takes a lot of time. I’m interested in helping the girls get involved in other activities as well.”
Doss thinks that at a school like Guilford, where very few athletes go on to play competitively after they graduate, the role of athletics is educational.
“This is a very important part of their education,” Doss said. “They’re learning teamwork, of course. But haw they handle the loss tonight will be part of they’re broader learning process, will help teach them sound strategies for working with other people when the problems are much more serious as they make the transition out of college.