University of Maine women’s basketball coach Amy Vachon and her players know the importance of winning non-conference games.
When it comes to NCAA Tournament seeding, they are just as important — if not more so — than the team’s America East games.
If the Black Bears win their third straight conference tournament championship this season, which would earn them another NCAA berth, their showing in non-conference games could determine whether they face one of the nation’s top 10 teams in the first round or a lower-ranked team they would have a chance to upset.
Monday’s 76-70 overtime loss to Brown University picked to finish last in the Ivy League’s preseason poll isn’t going to help matters. Brown graduated four of its top five scorers and was coming off a 45-44 loss to Bryant University.
“It was definitely a wake-up call for us,” junior guard Dor Saar said. “It was a tough loss. We should have won. We didn’t play well at all. We need to work harder. We need to pick up our defense and be more patient on offense.”
Vachon described her team’s performance against Brown as “awful” but said there could be a silver lining as UMaine prepares for Sunday’s 1 p.m. home opener against Boston University and former Lawrence High of Fairfield star Nia Irving.
“We’ve had bad games before but we didn’t lose them. We were able to pull them out,” Vachon said. “If we had won that game, I don’t know if we would have learned the lessons we needed to learn. We’ll figure it out together and be better for it.”
Both UMaine and BU are 1-1.
“Every team gives us their best shot so if we don’t come out ready to go, anyone can beat us,” senior guard Blanca Millan said. “It definitely hurts. We will definitely take that [Brown loss] to heart. We will learn from this.”
The Black Bears were outscored in the paint 22-8 during the fourth quarter and overtime and squandered an eight-point fourth-quarter lead. Brown went 4-for-4 from the floor during overtime while outscoring UMaine 15-9.
“We didn’t play good defense at all,” Millan said.
Without injured senior forward Fanny Wadling (concussion), America East’s top rebounder last season, UMaine was outrebounded by Brown 45-36.
Six-foot University of Delaware transfer Gadson Lefft and 6-2 Alex Bolozova are also unavailable due to injuries so UMaine starts four guards and 5-11 junior forward Maeve Carroll.
Millan has been a bright spot.
The reigning America East Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year shares the NCAA Division I scoring lead with East Tennessee State’s Erica Haynes-Overton, each averaging 32 points per game. Millan had 27 against Brown.
Freshman guard Anne Simon from Luxembourg has started in place of Wadling and ranks second on the team at 11.5 points per game.
“She is a really good player. She has been doing a lot of good stuff,” said Saar, who shot 1-for-11 from the floor against Brown, including 0-for-9 from beyond the 3-point arc.
“I haven’t had a lot of games like that although I know those kinds of games happen,” Saar said.
“Some of those shots were bad shots. My decision-making wasn’t very good. And [on others], I didn’t get the bounces. That’s part of the game.”
Vachon credited Brown with a very good performance and pointed out that her team had only two returning starters on the floor in Millan and Saar, the all-conference guard
Wadling is the other returning starter.
“We have a lot of girls playing now who hadn’t played much before,” Vachon said. “They have a lot of learning to do.”
The Black Bears look forward to facing BU.
“They’re a very good team. We’re very excited to be playing our home opener. We’ve got to come out ready to go,” Millan said.