2013-2014 Nova Schedule previewed at Awards Banquet

[tpenter]

The awards banquet program included the opponents for the upcoming season, the first in the "new" Big East for the Nova women.

As expected, we will play a home and away with all nine of the other Big East teams, making our first visits to Omaha (Creighton) and Indianapolis (Butler), while making an annual visit to Cincinnati (Xavier) to replace the every other year to play Cincinnati who remains in the "old" Big East, now called America's Dumping Ground, or some similar name.

The four Big Five games will have us at Temple and LaSalle, and staying at home for St. Joes and Penn.

The other seven non-conference games will consist of a home game with Lafayette, road games at Lehigh and Sacred Heart, with the other four games taking place at Florida International for a Thanksgiving tournament and at Toledo's Tip-Off tournament to start the season (probably playing Drexel in one of those games).

Say goodbye to a top 50 RPI, but probably a good shot at 18 or 19 wins against that schedule, even with the significant loss of talent and experience this year. Still no word on a Big East commissioner or a site for the women's Big East tournament. They need to get their crap together soon if they expect to be taken seriously as anything more than a mid-major conference getting an NCAA bid for only the conference tournament champion and maybe one other team each year.

 

[ccoyer]

I think the NCAA tourney will take at least 3 teams from the new BE.

I will predict right now that next year's team will surpass the 21 wins from this year. I'll go with 25 as a nice round number.

 

[tpenter]

ccoyer - my thoughts.

Not winning the new Big East tournament might require 23 or 24 wins to get in the NCAA. Other than DePaul, Creighton, St. John's and maybe Marquette and St. Joes, any losses on our schedule next year would probably turn out to be a "bad" loss for RPI and NCAA tournament selection purposes. Not much margin for error. We would need to get real good defensively real fast or there will be some unexpected losses coming our way.

NCAA just announced that they will be making a decision in the next two weeks to install the 10 second backcourt rule this year. That should speed up the game and give Harry reason to let us run more, which I am sure we have all been waiting a long time for.

 

[ccoyer]

I think the team is already pretty good defensively. The achilles heel with the team last year was offensive rebounding.

I would be very happy if they pass the 10 sec rule. Our backcourt next year will be faster than almost any team with Devon and the twins. Katherine is actually faster than Caroline.

 

[UncleBill57]

I missed VU's FB banquet and both Basketball banquets this year for the first time in years due to unavoidable out of town trips. I missed going to them all.

We will sorely miss Laura Sweeney next year for the awesome player she was for us and the other seniors too. Yet for next year iwe have some talented players returning. But we'll be young with Kane being our only skilled senior we'll have unlike this year when we had 5 seniors. I see us having at least six returning skilled letter women returning with Taylor, Devon, Caroline, Katherine, Emily and Lauren who will form a strong nucleus for us next year. Hope I didn't miss anyone. We'll need additional players to contribute to round out enough players to complete the team.

Staying injury free will be a key next year especially among our top 6 returning players. Having injuries this year to Caroline, Devon and Lauren hurt us yet Caroline's injury resulted in Katherine getting PT which will likely help us for next year. Thankfully Caroline recovered from her injury but it likely impeded her progress. Katherine just stepped right in to take her place. Lauren never seemed to recover the shooting form she'd had the year before. Hopefully she'll recover that for next year. Devon seemed to regain her pre injury form and played especially well in the NCAA which we would have won had Laura not gotten injured with an obscenely mild penalty followed by an atrocious foul called on her.

I look forward to another fun year watching our new team play next year.

Glad to see Chris Coyer starting for Temple FB again this year a year after being MVP QB in their bowl game.

Oh, Caroline Coyer was MVP for her Virginia state championship team while Katherine was high scorer with 24 points in the state championship game. They should be a fun tandem to watch along with Devon Kane.