2013-14 Year in Review, Part III: Boston College Women’s Basketball

We break from the men’s sports to focus on the 2013-14 season in Boston College women’s basketball, as the ladies tried to improve upon the foundation being built by second-year head coach Erik Johnson.

In his first season since taking over for Sylvia Crawley, the 2012-13 Eagles went 12-19 (5-13) as despite winning an ACC Tournament game, they struggled to find their way in the Atlantic Coast Conference. How would 2013-14 go for the Eagles, and would at least one Boston College basketball team find success?

2013-14 Boston College Women’s Basketball: The Season

The men’s head coach barked about the difficulty of the non-conference schedule, but they didn’t face the #3 team in the nation right out of the gate like the ladies did. Boston College hosted the Stanford Cardinal to open the year, getting blown out in the first half but mitigating the damage in the second to lose by 12, 83-71.

On November 12, three days later, Boston College women’s basketball got their first win of the year against the Hofstra Pride on Long Island. That would begin a short stretch in which the Eagles won three of four, including victories against Florida International and UNC-Wilmington, and a loss to BYU.

The Eagles would be 3-2 heading into their game against Iowa, which produced a 78-68 loss and the start of a three-game losing streak. This one was not their ACC-Big Ten Challenge game, nor was their brutal 79-52 loss to USC (not too far off from what the gents did), but the 74-59 loss to the Wisconsin Badgers was. Boston College came back home at 3-5.

Yet, the Boston College women’s basketball season was about to take another turn. Following their December 5 loss to Bucky, the Eagles won their next game against Hartford. Then the next against Boston University. Then another against New Hampshire. In fact, the Boston College Eagles would launch into a seven-game win streak, including their ACC opener against the Virginia Tech Hokies. After that win, the ladies would sit at 10-5 (1-0), feeling good about where things were heading.

Unfortunately, that was where the season peaked and it was all downhill from there. From January 9 onward, up to and including the ACC Tournament, the lady Eagles would lose fourteen of their last sixteen games. The season ended with a 74-59 loss to the Virginia Cavaliers in the first round of the ACC Tournament, a competition in which they were the 15th (read: dead last) seed. Their final record was 12-19 (3-13), almost exactly the same mark they set in Erik Johnson’s first season in Chestnut Hill.

2013-14 Boston College Women’s Basketball: The Team

The Eagles were led in terms of points this season by Kelly Hughes, a freshman guard from Texas who had 347 total, or an average of 11.2 per game. Veteran player and senior Katie Zenevitch was just a basket behind her teammate with 345 total points for the year (11.1), while another veteran, sophomore Nicole Boudreau, had 343 (also an average of 11.1). That’s some balanced scoring.

Boston College’s roster featured four freshmen, including the standout Hughes, two sophomores, three juniors, and three seniors. Again, near perfect balance.

None of that meant they didn’t have their problems, however. Boston College women’s basketball managed 66 points per game (12th in ACC), about four points less than the opposition, despite shooting 42.7 percent as a team, which was sixth in the conference. As a three-point shooting team, the Eagles were third-best in the ACC at about 37 percent. That couldn’t cure the issues Boston College had with turnovers, of which they averages a whopping fifteen and a half per game. In case you were wondering, the Eagles were last in the conference in that department.