SPOKANE, Wash. -- From the start of preseason in October, it was clear that the Maryland women's basketball team had learned lessons from its disastrous second-round loss to Mississippi in last year's NCAA tournament. The Terps valued the ball more, their execution was crisper and they remembered to get the ball inside to All-America second-team center Crystal Langhorne.
In the end, however, their deepest flaw from the 2006-07 season, occasionally porous perimeter defense, doomed them in Monday's regional final. Stanford torched the Terps with a barrage of three-pointers to send Maryland home in disappointment for a second straight year.
The Terps (33-4), who gave up a season-high 98 points in an 11-point loss to the Cardinal, gave up 14 threes to Stanford and allowed senior All-America guard Candice Wiggins to score 41 points. The game might re-open questions over whether Maryland's 2006 championship run was the start of something lasting or merely three weeks of superior play from a team that has yet to return to that level when it mattered.
Unlike the 2006-07 season, when the Terps largely faltered against high-level competition, this season's Maryland team had a number of signature wins. And the Terps got them while having to adjust to two new assistant coaches, Daron Park and Diane Richardson, not to mention the near season-long distraction of head coach Brenda Frese's pregnancy and her absences.
"This year will always have an asterisk on it because Brenda wasn't there the whole time," television analyst Debbie Antonelli said. "These kids are on autopilot in some regards. That's no disrespect to Brenda or Daron [who took over the team in Frese's absences], but it's just that they understand what it takes."
The key to next season for the Terps lies in filling the gaping hole left by the departures of seniors Langhorne and Laura Harper, arguably the best frontcourt tandem in program history. Langhorne, the program's all-time leading scorer and rebounder, and Harper, the Most Outstanding Player in the Final Four two years ago, take more than 3,500 combined points and 2,200 combined career rebounds with them to the WNBA, where they are likely to be drafted in the first round next week.
