Its Basketball Time!

Tonight was the first exhibition game for the UNC Women's Basketball team. I missed the scrimmage with the practice team on Sunday but I was at tonight's game. All I can say is WOW. We got us some GOOOOD freshman. And the returning ladies look good too.

For a more professional recap - and photos check out the TarHeelBlue writeup.

I have volunteered to help out Tar Heel Team Tempo with some photography. All I had for this game was my point and shoot. There are a lot more in focus shots than I thought I would get. I played around and was please with how well I remembered the timing of the camera. Then I played with the burst mode some. I like the composite shots it made now I just need to figure out what to do with them. My photos are up on Picasa.

Francis Marion played really well. There are a lot of ties to UNC for that program. The UNC coach used to coach at FM and had been hired by an athletic director that had been a student athlete at UNC. One of the current assistant coaches of FM was a Tar Heel not that long ago. All that history, plenty of time to prepare, and FM came ready to play. They ran up and down the court. They had some really nice shots. They showed some Tar Heel style traps - which I think they did a good job with though it may not have been obvious since the UNC players broke the press a whole lot easier than they were doing last year.

The warmup was fun. There are a couple new drills and a lot of the shots were going in which is always a good way to start. During the game, there were the usual early season mistakes and freshman mistakes. Not as many as I remember from recent year though. These ladies know where they need to be and they play smart ball. Three freshman had 2 blocks each - some of those were also really nice ones. One had 5 steals - Krista Gross who a number of us kept confusing with Italee Lucas. I heard "yeah Italee" more than once when it was Krista who had just made the play. The returning students have all stepped up their games too - and they will need to if they do not want to loose there spots to some of the these fabulous five freshman.

-SML