Bryant College- 7:00 PM Hartford Civic Center

As promised, here is the women’s recap from last night’s game versus Team Concept.

The Lady Huskies opened up their exhibition season last night with a 101-87 win over Team Concept. Team Concept is made up of professional and former college players including 5 former UCONN Lady Huskies. The Huskies started off quick as Charde Houston scored 17 seconds into the game. Rita Williams scored for Team Concept to tie the game and then Team Concept took a 9-4 lead. The Huskies finally regained the lead for good at 19-17 on a three pointer from my favorite Husky and one of this year’s captains, Mel Thomas.

Notes and Observations of the game:

• The starters for the Lady Huskies were Renee Montgomery, Mel Thomas, Kalana Greene, Charde Houston and Tina Charles.
• The 5 former Huskies on Team Concept were Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, Rita Williams, Maria Conlon and Ashley Valley.
• Diana Taurasi lead all scorers with 31 points.
• Three Lady Huskies had double doubles. Charde Houston had 30 pts, 19 rebounds. Tina Charles had 16 pts, 13 boards. Kaili McClaren had 11 pts and 11 rebounds.
• Charde’s performance was reminiscent of her past one game flashes. As I stated in a previous post, she has rededicated herself to the game and the Lady Huskies. Lets hope that she is able to keep this play up for the entire season.
• Tina Charles is as advertised. For those who don’t know, Tina was the top player in all of high school basketball last year and came from the same school that Sue Bird came from, Christ of King in New York.
• Jacquie Fernandes got a nice welcome to the game by Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird. Jacquie was bringing the ball up and stopped her dribble in front of Sue. Diana came up from behind and tried to grab the ball from Jacquie almost throwing her down to the floor. To her credit, Jacquie held onto the ball.
• Speaking of Jacquie, her and Meghan Gardler did look at tentative at times in their brief minutes played. This is to be expected though as this was their first collegiate games.
• Renee Montgomery has stepped her game up to another level as evidenced by this quote from Sue Bird.

“Renee is definitely beyond her years. She shows maturity and she’s the player in practice, when things aren’t going well, she’ll pull the team into a huddle. She has to do that, but still as a sophomore to recognize the situation and to be able to be mature enough to get the team in the right place at the right time and make good plays is phenomenal.”

• Diana was talking trash as she normally does. At one point, she had Mel Thomas cracking up because she was talking trash as Mel was attempting a free throw.

Overall, a good first exhibition game for the Lady Huskies. I am sure Coach Geno Auriemma found something wrong with their performances and will have them working hard in practice. I will leave you with this quote from Geno on guarding Diana Taurasi:

Well, you can’t defend her, that’s the first thing. Charde said, “No body in their right mind would shoot from out there”. The worst thing you can do to Diana is guard her. If you guard her and you get her juices going you’re going to have a tough game ahead of you.

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Well this week marked the first games of the exhibition season for the UCONN men’s and women’s basketball team. So like I have been doing with football, I will provide a little blurb about the game and then some observations.

First up is the men’s report. The UCONN men took on American International College on Wednesday night at Gampel Pavilion and defeated them by a final score of 75-59. The final score was not indicative of how close the game actually was as the Huskies were losing at half time. The Huskies played sloppy basketball and as usual Coach Calhoun was screaming at his players.
Notes and Observations from the game:

• Nine Huskies made their debuts in the game including AJ Price, who led the Huskies with 17 pts
• The starting lineup was AJ Price, Craig Austrie, Marcus Johnson, Hasheem Thabeet, and Jeff Adrien.
• Hasheem Thabeet scored 11 pts, had 8 rebounds and 7 blocks. If he stays in school for 3 yrs, I think he will challenge Emeka Okafor’s records for career blocks and single season blocks.
• UCONN was outrebounded by a smaller AIC team in the first half. With UCONN’s size in the frontcourt, this should have never happened.
• After a poorly played first half, The Huskies kept AIC scoreless for about 10 minutes of the second half.

In a nutshell, it was a poorly played and executed game for the Huskies. As a young team, they will need to use this experience as a building block to get back to playing Huskie basketball. Some quotes from Jim Calhoun:

“We did what young kids do. We threw the ball away, didn’t rebound, fouled like crazy, couldn’t make gimmies. Some of this I knew, some of this I didn’t know. I knew it would be a teaching process…I didn’t think we would get outrebounded by a smaller team.”

“Overall, how would I grade it? I give it a D-minus.”

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