Marriott Cavalier Classic Preview
Sunday, December 28 2008 by Tim
Virginia hosts the Marriott Cavalier Classic women’s basketball mini-tournament beginning today at 2pm. The schools participating are Louisiana Tech, Rider, UMBC and, of course, Virginia. The Cavaliers hold a 6-2 combined record against the other three schools; they’ve never played UMBC and the two losses were both against Louisiana Tech.
Louisiana Tech takes on UMBC today at 2pm, followed by the Hoos taking on Rider at 4:30pm.
The losers of the above games will compete in the consolation game tomorrow at 4:30pm. The winners will take the floor at 7pm tomorrow.
The game against Rider today should be an easy one for the Hoos. Rider (2-7 on the season) is not good, their only wins coming against 2-8 Colgate and 2-6 Fairleigh Dickinson. Hopefully we can get a big lead early, some PT for some of the bench players and – after some rust removal – some rest for the starters.
Regardless of who the Hoos play on Monday – Louisiana Tech or UMBC – the game will be more competitive than the one today. Louisiana Tech (6-5) has a win against Arkansas and a couple of competitive losses to LSU and Western Kentucky (by one point). UMBC (7-4) definitely seems like the heavyweight of the bunch (if you could call it that). They’ve got wins over George Mason, Northern Illinois, Western Michigan, Navy and Towson and a close loss to Loyola-MD.
If we assume for a moment that UMBC will take on U.Va. tomorrow, there could be an interesting “high scorer” competition going on. UMBC’s leading scorer, Carlee Cassidy is averaging 24.9ppg. Virginia’s leading scorer is, of course, Monica Wright who is averaging 22.8ppg. It doesn’t seem like UMBC has the athletes to stop Wright, so it’ll be interesting to see what the Hoos defense (easily the best the Retrievers have seen this season) can do to Cassidy.
It should be a fun two days of basketball and I’ll be taking pictures to record that. Look for a recap and photos of each day a few hours after the second game of each day.
There’s only two things that I know about the Louisiana Tech women’s basketball team. The first is that they have the worst team nickname outside of the Hokies. The second is that the “Lady Techsters” (yes, that’s really their team name) came out to play