Coach Tony Bennett was frustrated with his team’s defensive performance. Virginia allowed Maryland to shoot 7-for-15 from three and win by 24 points. Photo by Grant Mathews.

Virginia entered last night’s game against Maryland searching for a consistent scorer. After receiving 66-42 thumping, coach Tony Bennett is still looking.

“Out of the last four games, this was the poorest,” Bennett said. “I wish it wouldn’t seem like it would be contagious, when one guy is off, a number of guys were certainly cold. I wish one guy would step up and get us going.”

During the Cavalier’s previous outing, senior guard Mustapha Farrakhan and freshman guard KT Harrell stepped up for Bennett, leading the team with 23 and 17 points, respectively. The two followed those performances, however, with a combined 5-for-21 shooting. After the team’s 72-64 win against Georgia Tech, the entire Virginia offense fell flat and turned in its worst scoring performance in John Paul Jones Arena history. Virginia’s 42 points were its lowest total since 1998 and less than the team’s halftime total against the Yellow Jackets.

Against Georgia Tech, Virginia relied on hot shooting, going 10-for-15 from behind the arc. The Cavaliers found less success from three-point range against Maryland, though, and connected on only 4-of-17 attempts.

The Terrapins “play good defense, they slow you down with their three-quarter, full court press,” Bennett said. “Were we going to go 10-for-15? Probably not, but we needed to hit a few more of those rhythm shots.”

At the outset of the game, Virginia appeared to carry over the momentum from its previous win and owned a 17-12 lead with seven minutes left in the half. Five minutes later, however, the team trailed by six points. Virginia finished the half with only 21 points.

“I think throughout the whole game we were kind of waiting for them to dictate to us,” senior forward Will Sherrill said. “Especially with our team, we don’t have a whole lot of offensive firepower.”
Virginia’s inability to generate offense ultimately crippled its defense as well. After holding the Terrapins to 26 points during the first half, the Cavaliers allowed Maryland to shoot 68 percent from the field during the second. The Terrapins outscored Virginia 40-21 during the second period, thanks in large part to 17 points off turnovers. Junior center Assane Sene had a career-high 15 rebounds in the game, but his six turnovers proved costly.

“Too many turnovers led to buckets for them,” Bennnett said. “I can live with guys missing quality shots, but there are some we needed to finish … There were too many point-blank shots that we missed.”

The Cavaliers limited Maryland’s talented sophomore forward Jordan Williams to four points and six rebounds, snapping his 13 consecutive-game double-double streak. Because all eyes were watching Williams, however, senior guard Adrian Bowie was able to sneak 22 points past the Cavalier defense.

“We lost vision. I thought defensively we were out of position,” Bennett said. “Looking at that stat line … I wouldn’t gave guessed that outcome, but they have some experienced players that certainly stepped up and hit some shots.”

Virginia will look to regain that vision but forget hindsight thinking, when it takes on a struggling Wake Forest team tomorrow.

“We let [Maryland] take the game to us, and especially in our home gym,” Sherrill said. “I wasn’t happy with my personal performance and I wasn’t happy with the team’s performance. Tonight we came out for some reason and were soft, and we can’t let that happen again because we have a great opportunity to win on Saturday.“

With less than 10 minutes to play in last night’s game, Virginia was exceeding expectations. The Cavaliers were holding Jordan Williams — Maryland’s do-it-all forward and the ACC’s fifth leading scorer — to a measly two points. Just one problem, though — the Cavaliers managed only 32 of their own.

I’m still not sure which team I was really watching last night. Could the guys in the white jerseys really have been the same team that went 7-for-8 from deep in the first half against Georgia Tech a few days earlier? Could the Cavaliers really have just finished the game with fewer points than they totaled in Saturday’s first half? No, I told myself. Surely the Cavs had accidentally traded schedules with the Albemarle High School junior varsity squad.

These Hoos are a funny bunch. One minute their shooters are hotter than Adriana Lima in a sauna, and the next they’re scoring less than Rainn Wilson at a night club. The Cavaliers shot a paltry 33 percent in last night’s contest, including a woeful 2-for-13 second-half three-point shooting display. They even converted just 6-of-13 from the charity stripe. My friend’s sister could do better than that, and she isn’t even walking yet.

With their best player hopelessly glued to his seat on the bench, the Cavaliers have been searching desperately for someone to take the torch firmly in hand on a consistent basis. Senior captain Mustapha Farrakhan is a natural choice, and there are nights when he looks like he could be Duke’s go-to scorer. Against the Yellow Jackets, Mu put up 23 points, a career-high in ACC play. Some were quick to throw the rest of his teammates on his back, hoping that he could carry the team to postseason glory. All he needed to do was duplicate such performances every night. That’s a tall order in this cutthroat conference, down year or not.

Farrakhan led the team in scoring again last night. This time, though, it was with eight points on 3-of-10 shooting. After a mediocre first-half performance that found his team down five points, Farrakhan knew he needed to come on strong in the final 20. Yet he took only four shots in that second half, converting just one of them. His lone bucket epitomized what the Cavaliers needed more of. Driving to the hoop midway through the half, Farrakhan had a look in his eyes that said no one was going to stop him from getting to the rim. Despite contact by the Maryland bigs, Farrakhan converted the basket, emphatically pulling the rim down in the process.

During a second half in which Virginia’s shooters couldn’t find a sliver of daylight, Farrakhan’s tenacity on that one drive is what they needed on every play. When the shots aren’t falling, the best way to vent your frustration is to attack the basket, no matter how much smaller you are than the trees in the paint. If you don’t get the basket, maybe you’ll get the foul or even the rebound. The Cavaliers attempted just five free throws during the second half. They should have been camping out on that free throw line.

On the other end of the floor, meanwhile, Virginia ran into a late game firing squad as the Terrapins cruised their way to 68 percent second-half shooting, finishing the game shooting 7-for-15 from three-point land. The pack-line’s strategy of doubling bigs like Williams in the low post proved effective in the game’s early stages, but a combination of carelessness, fatigue and bad luck led to Maryland swishes time and again from the outside late in the game. Tony Bennett’s men need to find a way to close out shooters, a growing problem this season.

They also need to solve the turnover problem, an issue that hasn’t killed this team during the course of this season but that certainly reared its ugly head last night. The Terps converted 17 points off Cavalier give-aways, many of which came from seasoned players like Farrakhan and Jontel Evans.

Uncertainties abound for this team, but one thing is clear — someone needs to rise to the occasion sometime soon.

“I really wish one guy would step up and get us going,” Bennett said.

A game against a pitiful Wake Forest squad this weekend might be just what the doctor ordered.

Junior forward Chelsea Shine leads the team with 11.2 points per game. Photo by Grant Mathews.

The Virginia women’s basketball team faces No. 15 North Carolina in Chapel Hill tonight looking to build off one of its best performances of the season, a 72-37 home victory against Virginia Tech last Sunday. The Cavaliers (12-9, 1-4 ACC) are currently tied for second-to-last in the ACC standings and must win the majority of their nine remaining regular season games to improve their NCAA Tournament chances in a year in which John Paul Jones Arena hosts a tournament regional.

“The team is coming together, and we’re ready to win and work hard in order to get into the NCAA Tournament,” junior guard Whitny Edwards said. “We know that we have to work as a team — all five players on the floor and our entire bench — in order to win.”

In an effort to make the tournament, the team is approaching the remainder of the season with urgency. Aware that unforced turnovers in offensive sets played a large role in an abysmal start to conference play, Virginia coach Debbie Ryan challenged her team to improve its ball-handling skills during the past week by carrying around and gripping a basketball outside of practice.

“We know that committing turnovers has been a problem, especially since it’s been on offensive possessions and not the fast break,” Edwards said. “The team’s pointed this out as a problem.”

A more pressing concern against the Tar Heels (17-3, 3-2 ACC) may be to control the pace of the game. North Carolina leads the ACC in scoring offense with 82.3 points per game — 15.4 more than Virginia. The Cavaliers may have caught a break, however, as Carolina senior forward Jessica Breland — who ranks second on the team in scoring with 12.6 points per game — may not play in tonight’s game because of an injury to her left knee.. But Carolina will be eager to reverse the course after suffering a 88-65 blowout loss at Maryland last weekend.

“[North Carolina] is a big team, but they really like to run a bit, so it’s going to be different from the game we had [against Maryland and Virginia Tech],” Ryan said.

Without Breland, Carolina will look to senior guard Italee Lucas, who leads the team with 18 points per game.

On defense, meanwhile, the Tar Heels will have to focus their efforts on junior forward Chelsea Shine, who is the only Virginia player averaging double-figure scoring numbers with 11.2 points on an average of 25.1 minutes per game.

“[Shine] had a good game against Tech and Maryland,” associate coach Tim Taylor said. “She needs to do what she does — she has a role on the team, and we’re telling everyone to just play to their roles and we’ll be fine.”

North Carolina boasts a 18-12 all-time record at Chapel Hill against Virginia. Tip off is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. at Carmichael Arena.

Consistently inconsistent.

That’s the best way to describe the 2010-11 Virginia wrestling team’s season thus far.

One week the Cavaliers (14-5, 2-0 ACC) come out and dismantle an opponent and the next they let up just enough to allow a weaker team get the better of them. This fickleness explains why their record consists of losses to unranked teams such as Buffalo and Wyoming. Virginia hopes that won’t be the case Saturday against Princeton.

“The downside is that we aren’t always consistent, aren’t always firing on all cylinders,” redshirt freshman Jon Fausey said. “And to be great, you got to have a great day every single day, a great competition every single day. You have to be consistent and consistent and consistent and perform at your highest at all times.”

But despite these disappointments and inexplicable gaffes, the team always responds. After losing to Buffalo, Virginia reeled off three consecutive wins; following the Wyoming loss it came back with an impressive victory against ACC rival N.C. State. And possibly most telling, after a heartbreaking 15-18 defeat to No. 21 Penn, the team bounced back by obliterating Virginia Military Academy and a convincing win on the road at North Carolina. The Cavaliers’ resiliency is their saving grace.

“On the other side, it shows that when adversity comes our way, we’re not just going to cower in the corner,” Fausey said. “We’re never going to quit and we’re always going to respond with a great effort.”

Virginia welcomes the unranked Tigers (3-6) to Memorial Gymnasium tomorrow. Last year the Cavaliers traveled to New Jersey and shut out Princeton 42-0. This season, however, the Ivy League team has shown vast improvement. Considering Virginia’s inconsistency, moreover, this match has all the makings of another letup performance after its win against Carolina. “Princeton is much, much improved this year,” coach Steve Garland said. “Coach [Chris] Ayres is one of the best young coaches in the country. They’ve had some really good duel meets and have some really good individuals. We have to be ready to battle.”

Players are aware of the troubling trend and say they have found a way to reverse it.

“We’ve focused on wrestling hard for seven minutes,” Fausey said. “When we wrestle hard for five or six minutes, bad things happen. We don’t finish our matches; we leave points at the end of the period. That’s how Buffalo happens, Wyoming happens. Pitt happens. So our focus is get them tired, wear them down and basically just go hard for seven minutes.“

Virginia’s tough losses against inferior opponents aren’t the only thing that the Cavaliers have had to battle back from this season. The team also has had to fight the injury bug — three of its top 12 wrestlers have sat out for an extended period of time. But Garland notes that’s just another road block the team has overcome.

“Whenever we are faced with serious challenges, they always respond,” Garland said. “That’s way beyond wrestling, man, that’s a life thing; that’s a life lesson that I’m proud of my kids for. Whenever they get knocked down, man, they get back up hard.”

Saturday’s match is scheduled for 1 p.m.



Courtesy Virginia Athletics.

The top-ranked Virginia men’s tennis team will host the ITA Kickoff this weekend at the Boar’s Head Sports Club. Virginia will face Cornell in its first match tonight. Depending on the outcome of that match, the Cavaliers could face either East Tennessee State or Binghamton tomorrow. The winner of the tournament will qualify for the National Indoor Championships.

Virginia (4-0) swept all three matches last weekend against Illinois, Notre Dame and Eastern Kentucky to begin the 2011 dual season. Senior Michael Shabaz, ranked No. 27 nationally, recorded particularly noteworthy performances, winning in straight sets against No. 11 Dennis Nevolo of the Fighting Illini and No. 71 Stephen Havens of the Fighting Irish. Shabaz was named ACC Player of the Week for his efforts.

It is unclear who Shabaz will face in the No. 1 singles slot against Cornell (3-0), which has started three different players at the top position thus far. No. 51 East Tennessee State (0-2) opened the season against top-notch competition, losing matches to No. 3 Tennessee and No. 13 Louisville. No. 50 Binghamton, meanwhile, opens its season this weekend. Last year, the three-time reigningAmerican East champions posted a 25-2 record, including a school-record 20 straight wins.

Virginia’s match against Cornell is scheduled for 6 p.m. tonight.

—compiled by Andrew Seidman

For all the longevity of The Cavalier Daily as an institution, its staff transitions are anything but drawn out. Some occasional shadowing aside, the outgoing staff works feverishly right up until election day. There’s a transition meeting the following morning, and that afternoon the incoming board members sit down in their new offices to start work on their first issue — which, by the way, they have a matter of hours to assemble before deadline hits.

With one day’s preparation, everything changes. As we recall well, there was precious little time for second thoughts, self-doubt or even some casual talk with the people who were soon to become our best friends.

We on the 121st managing board now sit on the other side of that transition. Elections come tomorrow, and Monday’s publication will mark the first for the 122nd staff. By that time, we’ll be old news. It’s an abrupt send-off, but so life goes in the world of a daily newspaper.

For now, we use this final editorial to reflect on what has been the kind of year that will stand tall among all the others in our memories.

There has been no shortage of important news since we took our posts. The shocking story surrounding the death of Yeardley Love emerged just days after our final paper of the spring semester had been published. A small but driven team of writers and editors worked through final exams, trying to make sense of everything that was happening. That story and the ongoing investigation of the Morgan Harrington homicide are among the most difficult subjects we covered, particularly given that our reporters are very much a part of the community they write about.

Along with those difficult events came a number of remarkable, positive stories. There are too many to list, but we feel privileged to say we covered the first transition to a new University president in two decades. That Teresa A. Sullivan is also the University’s first female leader only adds to the significance.

During our term, we’ve certainly not gotten every decision right — far from it. But we like to think even as we’ve made mistakes, we always did so the “right” way: with the best of intentions, a fierce drive to improve ourselves and some good humor thrown in.

It’s a common refrain for soon-to-be-outgoing managing board members to “joke” about getting their lives back, which includes sleep, good study habits, social time and the like. All kidding aside, it doesn’t take long to realize that although the past year may have seemed like a whirlwind, we were participating in something truly extraordinary. The seemingly endless coordination and effort that goes into producing a single issue can be exhausting. That we managed this feat a total of 128 times this past year is nothing short of miraculous.

Come tomorrow, this paper won’t “belong” to us anymore. It’s someone else’s turn to make the same kind of memories that the five of us will cherish for a lifetime. So we take this last opportunity to thank everyone who has made the experience unforgettable: our dedicated staff, well more than 100 individuals and thus too many by far to name here; those friends and family members who understood when they didn’t see or hear from us for a while; the administrators and student leaders who more often than not drive our content; the fine folks in Newcomb Hall who helped us move back and forth as our basement offices were renovated this past year; and of course, our readers, whose importance as the end consumers is paramount.

To everyone, we hope we gave you a publication that this university could be proud of. That was our goal from day one, and it remains so as the 121st staff signs off one last time. But regardless of the end result, we know The Cavalier Daily has given us much more than we have given it. For all the talk of service, our time here was much more an opportunity than it was an obligation.

We have tried to avoid cliché thus far, but there is at least one truth we’d be remiss to exclude. Working for a newspaper means always being fixated on the here and now. Once a paper hits stands, there’s little time to dwell on it. With that spirit in mind, we look forward to what the future holds for this publication. We wait to see the 122nd staff make some of the same mistakes we did, and more important, we look forward to seeing what they can accomplish that we never could.

From this day forward, we join you in becoming but readers and observers of The Cavalier Daily. That is a drastic adjustment for us, but we hope the changeover will seem subtle for everyone else who scans these pages. With yearly staff turnovers, college newspapers have perhaps the shortest memories of just about any media. No one can ever be quite sure what the next year may bring.

We look forward to finding out and we hope you will keep reading right along with us.

Shortly after President Obama delivered his 2011 State of the Union speech Tuesday night, Congressman Robert Hurt, R-Charlottesville, issued a brief response.

Traditionally, members of the opposing party respond to the president’s speech with statements of their own, explaining their party’s and their own perspectives on the issues covered in the address.
In his response, Hurt noted that “it was encouraging to hear President Obama address the pressing need to create jobs, cut spending and get our fiscal house in order,” but added that he “was disappointed by [Obama’s] renewed commitment to pursue more stimulus-style government spending.”

Obama’s speech focused on the nation’s need to strive for bipartisan cooperation; endorse research, innovation and education; and facilitate small business development.
“We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world,” Obama said. “That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future.”
Hurt, however, expressed more caution about government spending, stating, “In order for our economy to make a long-lasting recovery, it is critical that we remain committed to enacting policies that rein in out of control government spending, keep taxes low, and reduce the unnecessary regulations that hinder small businesses.”
Despite the differences between the two parties, Hurt said, “I look forward to working with the president and my colleagues to put those policies into place that will help grow our economy for all 5th District Virginians.”

—compiled by Caroline Houck

This week’s installment of “Ridiculous Happenings in College Sports” comes from the University of Connecticut, where Robert Burton, a major benefactor of the Huskies football program, wrote an angry six-page letter demanding the return of a $3 million gift he gave, along with removal of his family name from the football complex.

Why? Because UConn Athletic Director Jeff Hathaway did not include him in the loop during the recent coaching search. Burton found out from ESPN.

Before you jump to judgment, however, let me just say this — Robert Burton is a fan, just like any one of us.

Well, maybe not like us — I certainly don’t have $7 million to drop on a mediocre football program — but a fan nevertheless.

Burton’s letter and demand represent an honest assessment not just of where the sport is, but also of why people still continue to love it.

Burton’s letter also says a lot about the state of college football at this moment. It’s abundantly clear, or at least it should be now, that boosters have a strong, strong influence on athletic departments.
Some people, in reacting to this story, seem to have a strong problem with that. They’re shocked, shocked to find that boosters seem to have influence over hiring decisions.

It’s time for people to wake up and smell the roses — this is what college football is and has been for quite a while. For an athletic director to simply ignore someone after whom he named the building that houses his office is pretty ridiculous.

“Your lack of response … tells me that you do not respect my point of view or value my opinion,” Burton stated in his letter, and he could not be more right.

But beyond that, the anger expressed in Burton’s six-page rant — what someone on Twitter called “the ultimate drunk text” — reveals, or at least illustrates, one of the basic truths about the sport.

College football is ultimately about a personal relationship. More than any other sport in the country, people root for a college football team because of time spent at an institution rather than just geographic proximity. I may move away from Charlottesville, but I still went to the University of Virginia. I will be a fan of the Orange and Blue for a long time.

Burton was a UConn booster and fan because his son went there, his daughter-in-law went there and he received an honorary doctorate degree from there. Burton felt strongly that giving to the athletic department was important because of his own experiences with football.

“I was raised in a small coal mining town where most families lived from week to week,” Burton wrote in his letter. “I was very fortunate to be offered a football scholarship and a free ride to college. Without that scholarship, I would have worked in the coal mines all of my life.”

At the end of the day, Burton is a fan scorned. We’ve all rooted for teams that have seemingly made terrible decisions and been unable to do anything other than curse the owner or the coach or the GM.

Burton stood up and said he wants his money back. You may not like it, but you at least have to understand where he’s coming from.