Niagara/UB women’s game

[John]

Nice to see a game in the win column. Better ball movement and mental attitude when the game started to unravel for us in the last few minutes. Truly this whole year looks like a roller coaster season. Again we look like a team that will live and die on how Winfield plays. When your top scorer is your leading rebounder and your point guard has nine turnovers and the team has 35 turnovers it looks like a long year is ahead. Niagara is a total mess with only the Parker sisters the only players on the team. Would of loved to see these two players here at UB. Wow!! What a difference a few years look like when UB and Central Michigan were great teams and now Central with only one win is in a worst mess than we are. Patience and just enjoying basketball could be the keys for this year. Go Bulls!!!

[UBinMD]

17 minutes ago, John said:

Nice to see a game in the win column. Better ball movement and mental attitude when the game started to unravel for us in the last few minutes. Truly this whole year looks like a roller coaster season. Again we look like a team that will live and die on how Winfield plays. When your top scorer is your leading rebounder and your point guard has nine turnovers and the team has 35 turnovers it looks like a long year is ahead. Niagara is a total mess with only the Parker sisters the only players on the team. Would of loved to see these two players here at UB. Wow!! What a difference a few years look like when UB and Central Michigan were great teams and now Central with only one win is in a worst mess than we are. Patience and just enjoying basketball could be the keys for this year. Go Bulls!!!

Yeah, 30+ turnovers and you win really tells you Niagara is a total mess. I assume they extended the coach because they believe she can turn things around and want to give the program some stability to attract recruits. The officiating for foul calls all around was abysmal. How they called a charge when they Niagara player was completely in the restricted area was beyond a joke. The officials all stood around and talked about it, but refused to go to the monitor. It was shockingly poor! Then they went to the monitor for other much less questionable items. I believe they called one of the referees Father something, is he a priest moonlighting as a D1 referee? It was like watching Semi-Pro.

Edited December 8, 2022 by UBinMD

[TML1000]

Hoping for at least a somewhat respectable MAC season, that sees some growth and improvement with competitive games. This season is more about just weathering the storm in advance of a crop of promising recruits coming in next year.

Of course it will be a process but hoping within a few season we will be back to competing for MAC titles.

[John]

1 hour ago, TML1000 said:

Hoping for at least a somewhat respectable MAC season, that sees some growth and improvement with competitive games. This season is more about just weathering the storm in advance of a crop of promising recruits coming in next year.

Of course it will be a process but hoping within a few season we will be back to competing for MAC titles.

I wonder what the transfer portal will look like next year?? Maybe theParker sister and DeBarry from UCONN ?? Still do not understand one of the best local players and highly touted in DeBarry would still want to stay at UCONN and get absolutely no playing time. She can get an education anywhere and be able to play basketball!! Wow. Playing back home like so many of the former UB players did!!! Looking forward to the MAC season and go Bulls!!!

[TML1000]

15 minutes ago, John said:

I wonder what the transfer portal will look like next year?? Maybe theParker sister and DeBarry from UCONN ?? Still do not understand one of the best local players and highly touted in DeBarry would still want to stay at UCONN and get absolutely no playing time. She can get an education anywhere and be able to play basketball!! Wow. Playing back home like so many of the former UB players did!!! Looking forward to the MAC season and go Bulls!!!

Not sure what is up with DeBerry...she could certainly play just about anywhere in the nation. For sure would be a massive boost to a mid-major like UB but very unlikely in my mind. The bigger issue over the past 12 months IMO is failing to retain any of the top local talent within the 2023 class. Players like Clara Strack, Gretchen Dolan, Kaylee Kryzstof, not to mention some top players from the Rochester area. Sure, Strack and Dolan are headed to power conference programs(Va Tech and Illinois) but it is not as if either was such an "untouchable" level of recruit like DeBerry was or Madison Francis is showing herself to be currently. I am not sure if UB was even in on any of those players...Kryzstof is committed to Binghamton, basically a Canisius/NU level program, but is a pure shot maker, something UB sorely lacks these days. I know Shay Ciezki had an early offer from UB and Coach Jack years ago and she already looks like a budding star at Penn State. Imagine the difference she could've made on this team.

That said, maybe none of those players ever seriously considered UB for whatever reason, but it would be nice to retain more local players. Basically Summer and Fair were the two locals to play under Coach Jack and look what happened, they were the two best players over that tenure.

The incoming recruits Coach Burke has coming in next season are sure promising and now with the commitment of Bri Barr-Buday from Nichols for 2024 I am hoping that there will be more locals to come in the coming years.

[John]

4 hours ago, TML1000 said:

Not sure what is up with DeBerry...she could certainly play just about anywhere in the nation. For sure would be a massive boost to a mid-major like UB but very unlikely in my mind. The bigger issue over the past 12 months IMO is failing to retain any of the top local talent within the 2023 class. Players like Clara Strack, Gretchen Dolan, Kaylee Kryzstof, not to mention some top players from the Rochester area. Sure, Strack and Dolan are headed to power conference programs(Va Tech and Illinois) but it is not as if either was such an "untouchable" level of recruit like DeBerry was or Madison Francis is showing herself to be currently. I am not sure if UB was even in on any of those players...Kryzstof is committed to Binghamton, basically a Canisius/NU level program, but is a pure shot maker, something UB sorely lacks these days. I know Shay Ciezki had an early offer from UB and Coach Jack years ago and she already looks like a budding star at Penn State. Imagine the difference she could've made on this team.

That said, maybe none of those players ever seriously considered UB for whatever reason, but it would be nice to retain more local players. Basically Summer and Fair were the two locals to play under Coach Jack and look what happened, they were the two best players over that tenure.

The incoming recruits Coach Burke has coming in next season are sure promising and now with the commitment of Bri Barr-Buday from Nichols for 2024 I am hoping that there will be more locals to come in the coming years.

I do agree. Not really knowing what goes into these kids making a decision on a college. Is it the education or the chance to play on a big time environment and what they are being told by college recruiters. I bring up DeBerry because our family seen her in high school and being highly touted and was a big time player at 6’5’. The little bit we have seen her at UCONN she is a shell of herself. Still a little baffling that a kid would not want to not only get a education and not want to play the game they love instead of sitting on the bench and be a cheer leader. Hope that the local teams can continue to keep more of the local talent on our teams. Go Bulls!!!

[dj_paige]

On 12/8/2022 at 9:48 AM, UBinMD said:

Yeah, 30+ turnovers and you win really tells you Niagara is a total mess. I assume they extended the coach because they believe she can turn things around and want to give the program some stability to attract recruits. The officiating for foul calls all around was abysmal. How they called a charge when they Niagara player was completely in the restricted area was beyond a joke. The officials all stood around and talked about it, but refused to go to the monitor. It was shockingly poor! Then they went to the monitor for other much less questionable items. I believe they called one of the referees Father something, is he a priest moonlighting as a D1 referee? It was like watching Semi-Pro.

While everything said about the refs is accurate, the bigger problem is that Buffalo could not handle Niagara's defensive pressure, which has nothing to do with the refs. If we could have handled the pressure and won by 20 (we were winning by 17 at one point, I think), no one would care about the refs. Every opposing coach is going to see the video of this game and bring the defensive pressure. And Niagara kept it up the entire second half and there were no obvious adjustments by UB (which I believe to be the fault of the coaching staff) other than 2 or 3 times when they used Ogden as an outlet in the back court. They tried to dribble through pressure repeatedly; sometimes they retreated to the corner of the front court at the mid-court line, the worst place to go against half-court pressure. So let's hope the coaching staff has worked on this since the Niagara game.

[UBinMD]

2 hours ago, dj_paige said:

While everything said about the refs is accurate, the bigger problem is that Buffalo could not handle Niagara's defensive pressure, which has nothing to do with the refs. If we could have handled the pressure and won by 20 (we were winning by 17 at one point, I think), no one would care about the refs. Every opposing coach is going to see the video of this game and bring the defensive pressure. And Niagara kept it up the entire second half and there were no obvious adjustments by UB (which I believe to be the fault of the coaching staff) other than 2 or 3 times when they used Ogden as an outlet in the back court. They tried to dribble through pressure repeatedly; sometimes they retreated to the corner of the front court at the mid-court line, the worst place to go against half-court pressure. So let's hope the coaching staff has worked on this since the Niagara game.

I think the D2 players are not adjusting as they hoped and cannot “get away” with some of the stuff they could at that level. I assumed that since they were on championship caliber teams they would have been more used to playing higher level basketball. I hope they can start learning from some of this but they have quite a bit of tape at this point and adjustments haven’t really been made. Our shooting is abysmal and we can’t finish at the basket a lot of times. We are back to relying on Winfield (our new Fair with less talent) to determine if we will win or not. I’ll still root for them and I’m giving Coach Burke a pass on this season anyway. I’m glad Jasmine Young stayed or we would be even worse off.

[121Merrimac]

I wish we had tape when I was a kid. Listening to a coach is one thing, but watching as they describe it would have been next level (for me). 

[dj_paige]

43 minutes ago, UBinMD said:

I think the D2 players are not adjusting as they hoped and cannot “get away” with some of the stuff they could at that level. I assumed that since they were on championship caliber teams they would have been more used to playing higher level basketball. I hope they can start learning from some of this but they have quite a bit of tape at this point and adjustments haven’t really been made. Our shooting is abysmal and we can’t finish at the basket a lot of times. We are back to relying on Winfield (our new Fair with less talent) to determine if we will win or not. I’ll still root for them and I’m giving Coach Burke a pass on this season anyway. I’m glad Jasmine Young stayed or we would be even worse off.

I agree with you, but there are really only two former D2 players on the team, Winfield and Stone, and both struggle at times. Many other players have D1 experience, and of course two are true freshman who really have not contributed much yet.

[UBinMD]

1 hour ago, 121Merrimac said:

I wish we had tape when I was a kid. Listening to a coach is one thing, but watching as they describe it would have been next level (for me). 

Agreed, I probably would have stopped doing stupid things earlier if I could have seen it.