BIDDEFORD — University of New England women’s basketball coach Anthony Ewing said he thinks his team’s best basketball is still yet to come this season. The Nor’easters sit at 5-1 as they return from an extended holiday break, but it was the last two games in particular that has Ewing feeling optimistic about his team’s destined improvement.
“I think we made some progress the last couple games leading into break. I feel better where we’re at than I had before,” Ewing said of his team winning a pair of conference games by double-digit margins before heading into the holiday break. “I feel real good about where we’re at, especially considering that I don’t think we’ve nearly played our best basketball yet; I know we haven’t.”
The Nor’easters’ lone loss came at the hands of No. 3 Tufts in their second game of the season. UNE has since beaten perennial in-state powers Southern Maine and Tufts and defeated Commonwealth Coast Conference foes Eastern Nazarene and Endicott by 70-60 and 77-63 scores, respectively.
The Nor’esters’ return to the NCAA tournament will be paved by how they fare in conference play, as winning the conference regular-season title affords hosting the conference tournament, and winning that earns an automatic berth into the NCAA tournament.
Completing both those tasks, however, will not be easy task according to Ewing.
“The conference looks good, looks tough,” said Ewing.
The Nor’easters have already faced one of the conference’s three most-dangerous teams, in Ewing’s opinion, in Endicott. The others, Roger Williams and Salve Regina, will both visit Biddeford by the middle of January.
UNE has two games before the first of those games (against Salve Regina on Jan. 8), as the Nor’easters travel to in-state rival Bates and conference-rival Wentworth.
Ewing said the long break between the victory over Endicott and the clash with Bates ”“ 28 days ”“ is difficult to deal with, even for a team as seasoned as his.
“Re-energizing is good. This length of a break isn’t great,” said Ewing. “That’s a long time.”
Hopefully for the Nor’easters, the long layoff won’t affect leading scorer Kelly Coleman, who Ewing said began to heat up after a slow start.
“Kelly Coleman, who’s been a rock for us, started playing better towards the end of the semester. She started out a little rocky, but she’s worked out some kinks,” said Ewing.
Coleman had an all-conference and all-region season a year ago, when she averaged 17.7 points per game and 7.1 rebounds per game, but wasn’t getting the same type of results through this season’s first few games.
“I think that’s maybe one of the issues is that she is trying to one-up (last year), instead of just letting the games come to her and to trust her teammates,” said Ewing. “She was trying to do too much, and now this last game especially she looked like the Kelly that we know, where she kind of let it come to her and she still put up points and rebounds, and just relaxed a little bit and had a little bit more fun.”
While Coleman started to return to her dominant form, junior guards Alanna Vose and Meghan Gribbin have taken their games to the next level this season. Vose is second on the team in scoring, just 0.2 points per game behind Coleman, while Gribbin is second in the country in assist-to-turnover ratio, with 26 assists to just five turnovers.
To top it all off for UNE, the Nor’easters have a pair of capable bigs that are improving in sophomores Alicia Brown and Brooke Flaherty.
“We do have a height advantage over some of the teams in our conference for sure. In some games, that will be our focus,” Ewing said of the 6-foot-3 Brown and 5-foot-11 Flaherty.
The Nor’easters lost just once in conference play last season, and might have to duplicate or better that effort this year in order to host the CCC tournament. Doing so, however, will require UNE to be at its best in every game.
“Top to bottom, you have to be ready to play every game; there aren’t really any gimmes,” said Ewing.
— Sports Staff Writer Wil Kramlich can be contacted at 282-1535, ext. 323 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @WilTalkSports.
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