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Women’s basketball heads to Greensboro for ACC Tournament

No. 9 seed Virginia plays No. 8 seed Miami Thursday afternoon

<p>Junior guard Faith Randolph was named the ACC Player of the Week for the first time Monday. She also received All-ACC Second Team honors earlier this week. </p>

Junior guard Faith Randolph was named the ACC Player of the Week for the first time Monday. She also received All-ACC Second Team honors earlier this week. 

The Virginia women’s basketball team enters postseason play this week, competing in the annual ACC Tournament after upsetting nationally ranked Louisville Sunday. As the No. 9 seed, the Cavaliers will not play on the first day of competition Wednesday and will face off against No. 8 seed Miami at 2 p.m. Thursday in Greensboro, North Carolina.

The Cavaliers (17-12, 7-9 ACC) finished the regular season tied for ninth in the conference standings with NC State and Georgia Tech but were able to secure the No. 9 seed because of a three-way tiebreaker. The win against No. 3 seed Louisville played an integral part in breaking the tie.

“This is awesome,” coach Joanne Boyle said after the Louisville game. “You hate to see the players saying, ‘We’re doing everything right coach, but its not showing.’ It’s going to come. It’s going to come. They actually said what they needed to say in the locker room after the North Carolina game, which was, ‘Don’t quit. We are almost there. It’s going to happen for us.’ They didn’t quit on each other and they came out today and put that same effort forward and here we come off with a big win.”

Before the win against Louisville, the Cavaliers had come close to knocking off other higher-ranking seeds in the tournament, including No. 6 seed North Carolina, but were unable to play a complete 40 minutes and pull off an upset. Two games before losing to Carolina at the buzzer, Virginia led for the majority against No. 7 seed Pittsburgh but faltered in the last five minutes of the game.

“When you get to tournament play, you throw all the records out the window,” Boyle said. “People show up and that’s what’s great about tournaments — the underdogs have a chance to do what they do. We’re that team that’s a little hot right now and we hopefully can keep it that way. We have some momentum and if we stay healthy and practice well, we’ll see what we can do.”

Key player junior guard Faith Randolph, who had a foot injury a couple of weeks ago that caused her to miss the Florida State game, will need to stay healthy to give the Cavaliers its best shot.

Randolph was not missing Sunday night, when she scored a game-high 23 points and dished out eight assists to lead the Cavaliers over the Cardinals.

She also scored a game-high 24 points against North Carolina last Thursday to be named the ACC Player of the Week for the first time in her career Monday.

“We were going to beat UNC at their place on their senior night,” Randolph said. “We had that confidence in ourselves and we’re going to take that into the ACC Tournament.”

Randolph was also named to the All-ACC Second Team earlier this week — another career first. She is four points away from scoring 1,000 points, a feat her teammate senior center Sarah Imovbioh achieved Sunday.

Imovbioh arguably played her best game Sunday. She recording 22 points and 17 rebounds to secure the ACC regular-season rebounding title.

“It’s up there,” Boyle said. “It brought back memories of the Georgia Tech game from last year. She was rebounding, being the machine that she is. I’m just so proud of her. She had a tough time at the free-throw line last game and she came back so strong today and just didn’t let anything affect her. She really went in and had a phenomenal game.”

The Georgia Tech game Boyle referred to was actually a second-round game in the ACC Tournament last season. The Cavaliers lost 77-76 in that game, but Imovbioh had a career-high 27 points and 10 rebounds in the effort.

“The Georgia Tech game, it was you had to win to advance,” Imovbioh said. “In [Sunday’s] game, we had to win to put ourselves in a better position to get our momentum in the ACC Tournament because we are trying to make our run. So, that was my mentality going into [the Louisville] game.”

Another crucial player for the Cavaliers has been freshman guard Mikayla Venson, who was given ACC All-Freshman Team honors earlier this week after averaging 11.7 points per game and making 40 percent of her 3-point shots, one of the best percentages in the league. She is one 3-pointer away from having the most for a Virginia freshman in a single season.

It is safe to say that the Cavaliers will need to rely on these three players if they hope to make it to Sunday’s title game, but first they will have to face Miami (18-11, 8-8 ACC), who comes into the tournament having lost three straight.

In the regular-season matchup between the two teams, Randolph, Imovbioh and Venson were able to score in double digits, but the Hurricanes scored 42 points in the second half to pull away with a 67-58 win.

The game will be televised on RSN. The tournament will be played out at Greensboro Coliseum.

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