April 2, 2006

By Adam Lucas

Ask Sylvia Hatchell about keys to the game--not just a Final Four game against Maryland, but any game--and you're likely to hear two responses:

Rebounding.

Defense.

It's predictable to the point of routine. Even if the game apparently had nothing to do with rebounding or defense, that's what the Tar Heels will cite as the keys.

Carolina will come back to Chapel Hill this week after the 81-70 loss to Maryland in Sunday's national semifinals. Players will take a couple days off from basketball, while the coaches will spend time in the back corner office in the women's basketball suite breaking down film. They'll run the tape of the Maryland game in slow motion, they'll rewind it, and they'll watch it again. And they'll find two key areas of the game that allowed the Terrapins to advance to the national championship game:

Rebounding.

Defense.

Playing just seven players for appreciable minutes, the Terps outhustled, outphysicaled, and outrebounded the Tar Heels in Boston. They also proved to be the one team this season that has solved Carolina's multiple-look 1-3-1 trap. Maryland played well against that defense in their win at Chapel Hill. They played equally well against it in the ACC Tournament championship game but allowed 20 offensive rebounds and lost 91-80.

"They have played well against the 1-3-1," Ivory Latta said just before the team left for Boston. "But we've made a couple little adjustments for them."

Whatever the adjustments were, Maryland was ready. It wasn't that they made the extra pass; instead, they simply always made the right pass. Their consistently hot shooting eventually forced the Tar Heels out of their traps and left what had been a very poised Carolina team all season looking (quite literally) shell-shocked--"I felt like we weren't in rhythm," Sylvia Hatchell would say after the game--during most of the second half.

"They're a great offensive team," Hatchell said. "Their five starters are all very good scorers. They can all shoot the ball and they have big bodies inside."

Those big bodies showed a deft passing touch Sunday night, consistently drawing Tar Heel defenders and then dropping the ball off for an easy layup. Carolina eventually snapped out of their second-half slumber and cut into the Terp lead with under four minutes to play. Each time, however, Maryland had an answer.

Alex Miller hits a 3-pointer to make it 67-63, Maryland.

Maryland breaks a trap and gets an easy Crystal Langhorne layup.

Erlana Larkins cuts it to 70-68 with 2:05 remaining.

Shay Doron beats the Tar Heels downcourt and draws a foul. One play later, Carolina-killer Doron brings the ball frontcourt, encounters very little resistance, and sinks a simple 10-foot jumper.

The final gasp: an Ivory Latta pair of free throws that makes it 73-70 at the 1:04 mark.

You probably already know what comes next: a Maryland layup, this time by Laura Harper.

"Our rotations on the back side were off," Hatchell said. "Camille Little was in foul trouble, so she couldn't gamble. They'd get the ball into a trap and make the extra pass. We came out of those traps for a little while, but then as the clock came down we had to put more pressure on them again."

It was only as the clock was melting away that the Carolina offense ever appeared to get into gear. The Tar Heels shot poorly (36.8% from the field, 17.4% from beyond the three-point stripe) and failed to recover enough of the offensive rebounds to overcome the cold shooting. Maryland won the rebounding battle 41-31, marking the disturbing eighth time over the final eight weeks of the season that Carolina was beaten on the boards.

"Coach said rebounding was going to be the key to this game," Ivory Latta said, "and we got outrebounded."

Both teams will return virtually intact for the 2006-07 season. By then, the Tar Heels will have had plenty of time to evaluate what went wrong against Maryland twice during a 33-2 season. Duke used to be the demon of the program; now the Terps are moving towards that status.

"We'll watch the tape and we'll come up with another scheme against them," Hatchell said.

After watching Sunday's performance, it's a safe bet that scheme will have two key components:

Rebounding.

Defense.

Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly and can be reached at alucas@tarheelmonthly.com. He is the coauthor of the official book of the 2005 championship season, Led By Their Dreams, and his book on Roy Williams's first season at Carolina, Going Home Again, is now available in bookstores. To subscribe to Tar Heel Monthly or learn more about Going Home Again, click here.