By: Eyon Brown, contributing writer
It’s another season in the books for Terrier basketball. The men’s team finished their season up this past Sunday against Mercer, losing by a score of 69-68. They head into the SoCon Tournament with an overall record of 20-11, along with a Southern Conference record of 11-7. The women, on the other hand, finished their season on the road against rival Furman, losing by a score of 63-57. The women finish the regular season with a 10-19 overall record and a 3-9 SoCon record.
With the SoCon tournament set to begin in just a few days, head women’s basketball coach Jimmy Garrity said the team is “in a good place right now” and that they are playing with confidence. Sophomore Guard Cairo Booker says that the team is “moving in the right direction” and that the team is “a lot closer-knit” and “focused on the goal of getting out of the first round of the Conference tournament.”
A large part of the women’s team is freshman point guard, Da’Ja Green, who averages about 36 minutes per game. At such a late part of the season, Green says she is “kind of used to being on the court…as long as I push myself to my limits in practice, the game should come naturally as far as being able to run the whole time.”
Speaking of freshmen, the men’s basketball team has seen no shortage of playing time among its freshmen, particularly starting point guard Storm Murphy. Head coach Mike Young says that he has “never been hesitant at all to play freshmen,” but this far into the season, Young finds it a bit difficult to really look at them as freshmen any longer.
“Those guys have been in big games, they’ve helped us win a lot of games,” says Young. “They’ve been in the Smith Center at Chapel Hill, they’ve been versus Georgia Tech, and this league is always very strong and those guys have acquitted themselves quite nicely as young people.”
Of course, the conference tournament comes in the midst of the spring semester, which obviously affects the teams’ practice schedules, but neither Garrity nor Young seem to be having any issues working around that.
“That’s a big part of Wofford and their Wofford experience,” says Young. “They are here first to get the finest undergraduate education there is in the country, and they also happen to be very good basketball players…We have never ever made any bones about what comes first, and that’s their studies.”
As for Garrity’s team, the women’s eyes are still on their primary goal: advancing past the first round of the SoCon tournament, an accomplishment that has never happened in the history of Wofford women’s basketball.
“They’re competitors,” he says. “Their interests and our goals are still set. They want to advance in the SoCon tournament, so we’re working toward that and still continuing to work better and get better every day.”
Both the men’s and women’s basketball teams are relatively young for the SoCon, with the women’s team having seven underclassmen on its roster and the men having 10, but Young is not a fan of using that as an excuse.
“I never mention to people how young we are. I don’t care how old you are, I don’t care how young you are, I don’t care where you are in terms of your roster. The name of the game is playing well and winning basketball games,” says Young. “I’ve a got a good roster, I’ve got very good players, and if we play good basketball…we should give ourselves a chance to win every night.”
The Southern Conference tournament will take place March 1-5 at the U.S. Cellular Center in Asheville, N.C. As Wofford basketball prepares for its trip, there is certainly no shortage of confidence in the locker rooms, and we’ll all be cheering on our beloved Terriers as they try to accomplish the ultimate goal of advancing in the tournament and capturing a SoCon Championship.
