BU women’s basketball, imperfect as ever, rallies to a blowout exhibition win over Division 3 Emmanuel
After scoring just 25 points in an ugly and frustrating first half, the Terriers exploded in the second half behind relentless defense.
BOSTON — She put everything into the halfcourt heave and waited for it to clank off the side of the backboard, ending a particularly ugly first half. And then Aoibhe Gormley got mad. To herself — but loudly, in case anyone was close enough to hear — she voiced some rather convicted displeasures. She hung her head, yanked her jersey out of her shorts and stormed out of Case Gym.
Boston University women’s basketball was always going to frustrate people this season.
Namely — itself.
Because these Terriers, clearly, are as competitive as they are imperfect. That’s how a sophomore guard exits the first half of a game that doesn’t count — against a Division III opponent — in a huff. It’s also how said sophomore guard finishes said game that doesn’t count all smiles, hugging her freshman teammate and cracking jokes.
After all, frustration is a good thing when it’s channeled in the right ways. And on Tuesday night, BU took all of the anger from a disjointed first-half performance on offense, turned it into a sledgehammer, and laid the boom on helpless Emmanuel College in the second half, running away with a 71-38 victory at Case Gym.
The Terriers (1-1), scorers of only 25 points in the opening 20 minutes, hung 46 on the Saints after halftime.
“Our young players bring a phenomenal energy that we haven’t had in the past,” head coach Melissa Graves said, referring to the freshmen and sophomores who make up 75 percent of her roster.
Freshman forward Allison Schwertner paced BU with 17 points on 8 of 11 shooting. She collected five steals as the Terriers recorded 16 total and forced 27 turnovers, relentlessly hounding the Saints after the break.
“We were able to get in transition and get some easy buckets because of that,” Graves said. “So our defense kind of sparked our offense there.”
That’s the way it’ll need to be as BU’s young, mostly brand-new roster continues to figure it out on offense. The Terriers finished with 32 points off of turnovers, 19 of them in the second half. Leading only by nine at the break, BU outscored Emmanuel 23-6 in the first six minutes of the third quarter.
Graves said BU’s “biggest goals” were on the defensive end, even after that side of the ball was among the bright spots in a blowout loss at No. 2 UConn five days prior. She emerged able to declare the Terriers accomplished most of those goals, and she consistently praised her team’s defense throughout the postgame press conference. The biggest part of that effort was BU’s constant willingness to compete.
“I think we’re ahead of where we’ve been in the past defensively,” Graves said. “They’re going to run through a wall, they’re going to play hard, they’re going to buy into what we’re doing.”
“Basketball, at the end of the day, is just basketball. You have to have confidence coming out no matter who you’re playing,” Schwertner said. “Don’t take anyone too lightly, and don’t take anyone too greatly, just believing in ourselves and knowing who we are and coming out and playing BU basketball every day is the ultimate goal.”
The 6-foot-3 freshman, thrust into the starting lineup to start this season amid injuries to two junior bigs, suffered through a two-point first half. BU clearly made an effort to feed her in the post, but she struggled to work herself open for entry passes, and when she did get the ball, her plan looked awkward and overthought.
Then, in the second half, BU started running. Schwertner ran with it. The opportunities to play in transition were there, of course, and Schwertner found herself wide open for multiple easy layups on the break. Of those 23 BU points in the opening six minutes of the half, Schwertner scored 15.
“I think my teammates really coming together, hyping us up to come out and have a stronger second half,” Schwertner said when asked what changed. “Our defense led to offense, and once we got some good steals and good transition, my teammates were able to find me and it was just better from there.”
Gormley, BU’s lightning-quick point guard, had seven points and dished out nine assists to only two turnovers.
Powered by its play in transition, BU was better across the board on offense in the second half. A 40 percent first-half shooting clip became 58, and in the moments when BU was forced to play in the halfcourt, the Terriers were calm, comfortable and confident. When Schwertner received her first entry pass of the second half midway through the third quarter, she caught it and went straight up. No hesitation. An easy layup — plus the foul — followed.
“I thought we did a much better job in the second half, just flowing into what we talked about offensively, and getting into that a little bit quicker,” Graves said.
Senior guard Alex Giannaros finished with 11 points and made three 3-pointers, and freshman guard Hildur Gunnsteinsdóttir added eight and two, respectively. Sophomore wing Audrey Ericksen, who entered just 1 of 7 from behind the arc, rained in two more 3s in the fourth quarter, both wide open out of a halfcourt set.
BU’s got a long, long way to go at that end, especially in the halfcourt, but that’s to be expected — there is all of one upperclassman in BU’s rotation right now. Graves blamed the ugly first half on Emmanuel’s zone defense, a strategy she said the Terriers haven’t been able to rep against much.
But the reality is that this team hasn’t been able to rep much against anything.
“Are they going to make mistakes?” Graves asked the press room. “Yeah.”
They’re going to get frustrated when they make them, too.
But on Tuesday night, BU women’s basketball reveled in that.
“It’s my freshman year,” Schwertner said. “So just go out there and have fun.”
