Virginia has played the toughest schedule in the ACC to date. Fielding a team in the midst of the pandemic has been hard enough, but even a major snowfall further altered the schedule. This is the first of six games that the women will play in 13 days, and playing a Virginia Tech team that is more ready than their male counterparts to ascend to the top of the table, well, that was always going to be a tough ask.
Virginia        52
Virginia Tech    69
Positive
Eleah Parker is a real center. Thrust into the starting lineup, she scored 12 points, had six boards and three blocked shots. Parker has nifty footwork and a good release around the basket, and two years ago at Penn, she was the second leading shot blocker in the country. She’s a force down low, and when she was able to get set, she defended Kitley about as well anybody in the country will do. The problem was…
Negative
Parker is slow, really slow. I don’t know if it is because of poor conditioning or just awful foot speed, but Kitley runs like a guard and she had too many points where Parker wasn’t even in frame when she scored. In the second and third quarters, Virginia did a better job of starting London Clarkson on Kitley and then allowing Parker to pick her up on rotation.
Positive
Taylor Valladay is really coming into her own. Valladay constantly pushed the pace and probed the lane, never allowing Tech to get fully set when Virginia began their rotations. If she had tweaked her ankle on Thursday, I couldn’t tell. She scored a team-high 16 points as she went 10 – 13 from the free throw line. This was huge because she came into the game converting at just a 60% clip. I saw her go 0 – 4 from one trip to the foul line earlier in the year.
Positive
Valladay caught a Liz Kitley elbow which knocked her to the deck. It was eerily reminiscent of Armando Bacot bloodying Kadin Shedrick. And just as with the men, the play was a non-foul and deemed to be a “basketball” play. I fully understand that Kitley did not mean to whack Valladay, but an elbow to the face is an elbow to the face, and it ought to be a foul, or it not to be.  But to not call it because it was deemed to be “like” basketball means it is a useless rule on the books.
No matter. Valladay took matters into her own hands. The next three times she got the ball into her hands she drove right into the Tech defense and got to the rim. She got fouled twice (made 2 – 3 free throws) and had a pair of buckets. Valladay fulfilled one of the oldest coaching dictums:  if you don’t get the calls, take it out on the other team. This run fueled a Virginia 8 – 2 run that, briefly, made it a two-point game.
Negative
I love women’s sports. But watching women play this game with false eyelashes is jarring. It just is.
Positive
This team just doesn’t give up. We just don’t have the horses to keep up for a full 40 minutes. Once again, the Cavs were extremely competitive in the first quarter, down just three points despite a 10-point Kitley explosion. Virginia’s most memorable play of the game was late in the 3rd quarter, Virginia was down by a dozen, and Kitley blocked Parker’s shot out-of-bounds. On the ensuing in-bounds, Parker got the ball at the top of the key, took two steps and went right at Kitley. Two points.
Negative
Virginia continues to turn the ball over. A lot. Virginia had 6 TOs in the first seven minutes, and then comparatively, did better, turning the ball over “only” 10 times in the next 33 minutes. Sounds like improvement, right? Except that Virginia had 6 or 7 offensive fouls which ought to be considered turnovers. Most those offensive fouls were just shoot-yourself-in-the-foot pointless fouls. Virginia isn’t going to win any games logging those kinds of turnovers.