It's ACC Time for Maryland Women

Usually by the time ACC play opens, the Maryland women's basketball team is rolling along. In each of the past three years, the Terrapins have entered their conference opener with a string of blowout victories, a top-six national ranking, and a fairly strong sense of self.

This season is a little different. The Terrapins, who host Wake Forest tonight, are 12-2 and ranked 14th, but they're still figuring out how good they can potentially be.

"We're definitely a work in progress, and I think we'll be that way up until tournament time," Coach Brenda Frese said. "We continue to challenge this team, and find different strengths that we have. . . . It's much different than our last two to three years, in terms of our experience and our veterans. But it's also exciting."

Maryland relied on the same core group of players during the past three seasons, but lost many of those players -- namely Crystal Langhorne and Laura Harper -- to graduation. The Terrapins, who were picked to finish second in the ACC in the preseason poll, spent the past two months learning how to integrate several new players with their trio of returning starters, seniors Kristi Toliver and Marissa Coleman, and sophomore Marah Strickland. Junior college transfer Dee Liles and freshman Lynetta Kizer stepped in to fill the front-court spots.

Maryland's two losses equal the number of pre-conference losses it had in the past three seasons combined. But the Terrapins have faced a difficult slate: Nine of their 14 games have come away from Comcast Center, and five of those games were against teams that have appeared in the national rankings at some point this season. They had mixed results against those teams, beating Purdue, Old Dominion and South Dakota State, but losing to TCU and Pittsburgh -- the latter coming by a shocking 29-point margin.

Still, those experiences helped prepare Maryland for the kind of athletic and talented squads it will see in the ACC. Five conference teams -- North Carolina (No. 2), Duke (No. 5), Maryland, Virginia (No. 15) and Georgia Tech (No. 22) -- are in this week's top 25, and Wake Forest (12-1) also received votes. On Monday, unranked Florida State upset third-ranked and undefeated Texas A&M.

To have success in the ACC, teams need "a level of toughness when you go on the road, [because] the environments and atmospheres, it's a whole other level of play," Frese said. "I think you have to take care of the basketball -- you can't waste possessions against equal talent that can match you from a scoring end -- and you have to be able to get stops on defense."

The Terrapins have shown flashes of those qualities at times throughout the season. But they are still trying to develop one other quality necessary to weather the ups and downs of the conference schedule: depth. Maryland relies heavily on five players. Toliver, Coleman, Liles, Strickland and Kizer account for 84 percent of the team's scoring and 71 percent of its rebounding.

"There's not a lot of room for error," Coleman said. "We're not as deep, we still have people overcoming injuries, stuff like that. It's hard not to get into foul trouble; Lynetta picks up one, and we kind of have to sit her, to make sure she doesn't make that freshman mistake. I think that's why the coaches harp on the little things so much. If we can correct those things, then there is that room so if we make that one mistake, it's not going to hurt us as bad."

The Terrapins have to be ready from the start. After tonight's game against an improved Wake Forest team -- the Demon Deacons were picked to finish last in the ACC, but won their first 12 games before losing at Richmond, 45-33, on Tuesday -- they travel to rival Duke on Monday.

"I definitely think we're still a work in progress, and that's not a bad thing at all," Coleman said. "If anything, it's a good thing. We don't want to be at our best right now, we don't want to peak right now. We want to peak when March and April comes around."