Gold Rush: Charlene Curtis Q & A
11/25/2002 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
Charlene Curtis believes the time is now. Her women's basketball team has shown slow but steady improvement during her five years in Winston-Salem, and after a tenure-best 12-16 record last season, she thinks the 2002-03 Deacons can get past .500 and may contend for a postseason berth. Gold Rush talked to Curtis on Oct. 24, after two weeks of some good news, in the form of solid practices, and some not-so-good news.
Gold Rush: You'll be without junior Tracy Alston and freshman Porsche Jones for a little while. That has to be a big blow.
Curtis: It is in terms of depth. I thought we'd be a lot deeper early. We have to be cautious in how we do things now, because we don't have the players to replace them. Both of those players would fit right into our full-court, push the ball philosophy, and Tracy's experience will be missed, so that's kind of a downer, But we'll have her back in December, and possibly Porsche in January, but we won't know until closer to that time.
Porsche's walking around and being a passer in practice, being an active as she can be without cutting or running hard on that knee.
Gold Rush: When did she hurt it?
Curtis: She originally had a knee problem her junior year (in high school) and that was never really addressed. She hurt it a little more severely in an all-star game this summer. We really thought it was just a cartilage issue, but it turned out to be a lot like Rafael's (Vidaurreta's) injury a couple of years ago, where a little bit of the muscle was pulled away from the bone in the knee.
The healing process is not the cartilage, it's the bone, and that's no fun.
Tracy can't wait to get back. She's working out real hard.
Gold Rush: How's practice been?
Curtis: Very good. I'll tell you what's so great about this group. In the fall, they asked to do more. They told me they wanted to do more running, more hard conditioning early. When they came back from fall break, during a scrimmage, they said they felt tired and can we do more conditioning to get ready. That's good, a good sign. They've worked hard in the offseason, harder than they have before, and we can do more as a result.
Gold Rush: And that helps in terms of stepping up the level of play during the season.
Curtis: Absolutely. Our senior class is leading us in that regard. Tiffani Listenbee's improvement is obvious. We're counting on Johanna Bjorklund to have an impact. She had a presence her freshman year that has disappeared, and she's really taken it upon herself, because she knows we need a scorer down low. She's becoming more effective at it.
Our junior class is really strong again. You take Tracy out of that group, but Bianca Brown, Tonia Brown and Eafton Hill, hopefully those three will be on the floor a lot.
We really need Tonia to be a better player, to be a more consistent shooter, and then we need Eafton back in the mix (after her injury-plagued sophomore season). We didn't have another scorer. If you look at that mix, Bianca worked a lot on her shooting and can help us in scoring.
So can Cotelia Bond-Young from the freshman class. She's a very exciting player. She has Bianca's quickness and speed, but has more court awareness than Bianca did as a freshman. In terms of tempo, wow. She pushes it, she can shoot it, she gets to the hole, she rebounds, shoots the 3.
Gold Rush: So the freshmen are living up to what you thought they would be coming in?
Curtis: Yes. Sandi James is probably going to take a while to get in the mix, but at 6-foot-6, it gives Johanna somebody to work against in practice every day, and she'll get better working against Johanna.
Liz Strunk, I knew she was a very good stationary shooter, but she has a very good sense of the game, very good knowledge. Her issue is getting up and down the court with us when we push the ball, but when she's there, she can get down in the blocks and score and does the little things very well.
Gold Rush: Losing LaChina Robinson in the blocks affects this team in a lot of different ways.
Curtis: She was a loss in terms of her presence. She never put up a lot of numbers, but she used her size very very well.
There will be times when we use a lineup of Bianca, Cotelia, Tonia, Eafton and Tiffani. We did that some last year, with Erin Ferrell in the mix, but those three guards, I don't know if I'd want to play against us.
Erin has played well since fall break. She's slow getting into it, but we've changed our offense up so multiple people can get into the post with more cutting, and it's taken Erin a while to grasp it. She's played very well the last few days.
Gold Rush: What about the rest of the sophomores?
Curtis: Jennifer Johnson is injured right now. She had foot surgery this summer and had a nerve problem with her foot. She started practices the first week and couldn't get through it. She had surgery and will be out until around the first of November. We could use her, could use a little bit of depth there.
Meredith Bell's a better player than she was a year ago. She's more confident, her ballhandling is getting better, and we're working on her shooting. She knows the weight of the team is not on her shoulders, so she's able to get out there and just play.
Gold Rush: Is this a year for another small step forward for this program?
Curtis: I'm looking for the bigger step. We've taken a lot of small steps. Some you don't see in the record book, but you did last year with the number of close games we had. It's time for us to win those close games. We have a good nonconference schedule, which is very important, but we have to be careful, because there are teams who will want to make their season by coming on our floor and beating us.
We have UAB coming here, a game that we didn't play well in last year. We have to go to Wilmington, which will be better. We lost to Western Carolina, and we have them coming here. We open in a tournament at SMU, playing LaSalle for the first time since I was at Temple. The schedule is very winnable, but it will be important. We'd like to go 11-0. Is that a stretch? Probably. But it's possible. We dropped some games last year that kept us from getting to .500, and we can get past that this year.
It's a different feeling for me this year. The players told me when they played pickup games this fall, everybody was there every time they played. That's never happened before. It's a whole different mentality. That'll go a long way at game time.