March 4, 2007
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Game Recap: Vanderbilt 81 Georgia 56
Balcomb, Vanderbilt on the Defensive in Rout of Georgia
By Will Matthews
DULUTH, Ga. – Count it as a message clearly received.
A night after laying into her team for what she deemed a sub par defensive effort Friday against Florida, Vanderbilt Head Coach Melanie Balcomb was all smiles Saturday night after watching the Commodores carry out what she called “the best defensive effort by a Vanderbilt team” that she has ever coached.
The Commodores limited Georgia to just 25.9 percent shooting from the field in the first half and surrendered just 18 points in the game’s first 20 minutes – an output that tied a season low for the Bulldogs – en route to an 81-56 rout that earned Vanderbilt a spot in tomorrow night’s Southeastern Conference Tournament championship game.
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Vanderbilt was the defensive aggressor from the opening tip Saturday, emphatically responding to Balcomb’s challenge from the previous evening to pick up the intensity on the defensive side of the ball.
“If we have that kind of defensive effort every game, it makes it a lot of fun,” Balcomb said. “It is a lot of fun to watch and a lot of fun to coach.”
The tone struck by Balcomb Saturday night was markedly different from that of Friday’s post game press conference where, despite Vanderbilt’s 105 point offensive output, Balcomb seemed to want to do little else but highlight the Commodores’ defensive inefficiencies.
“I caught some flack for getting on them at halftime [Friday] pretty hard and I haven’t had to do that in a long time,” Balcomb said. “I got on them hard when we were shooting 70 percent from the field. What I tried to explain to everybody was that I didn’t get on them about offense. I didn’t even talk about offense. What I talked about was defense.”
Balcomb was frustrated after Friday’s win by what she called a defensive complacency on the part of her Commodores and a seeming willingness to simply exchange baskets with Florida.
There was no such complacency Saturday.
The SEC’s freshman of the year Ashley Houts was limited to just a single field goal and senior guard Janese Hardrick, one of Georgia’s all-time scoring leaders, didn’t score a single point. Georgia shot just 38.2 percent from the field overall Saturday, and made just 2 of their 13 three-point attempts.
“[Balcomb] basically called us out,” said Vanderbilt senior forward Carla Thomas, who scored 13 points on 5 of 5 shooting from the field Saturday despite being in and out of foul trouble. “So we knew that we had to come into the next game and try and step it up. It was something that we focused on all season, and to come in and not play that way in the SEC Tournament was disappointing to us.”
Much of the publicity that this Vanderbilt team receives surrounds its offensive abilities, and for good reason. The Commodores Friday became the first team since 1998 to break the 100-point mark in an SEC Tournament game, and for an encore Saturday they shot 56.8 percent from the field as a team and 61.5 percent from three-point range.
Sophomore forward Christina Wirth has hit 9 of her 10 three-point shots in the first two games of this tournament, and on a night Saturday which saw seniors Thomas and Dee Davis limited by foul trouble, the Commodores got offensive contributions from up and down the roster.
Balcomb herself acknowledges that she has a team full of shooters, all of whom are brimming with confidence right now.
But she also knows that Vanderbilt’s ability to get where it wants to go will be largely dependent upon its how it plays defensively.
“You win championships by defense and that is something that we have not been able to do,” Balcomb said. “You put the two together and I think we can be really tough. And that was my point [Friday] and that is why we emphasized it so much.”
Point taken.
Will Matthews spent three years as an investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Newspaper Group in Southern California. He is currently in his third year at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
