UNC women's basketball gets set for NCAA tournament

The routine remained the same.

Even after 14 days without a game, nothing changed in the North Carolina women’s basketball team’s mechanical practice regiment.

About 10 minutes of stretching turned into jumping jacks to the tune of players reciting C-A-R-O-L-I-N-A before they collapsed into a huddle while junior point guard Latifah Coleman called “Who?” and received the answer “Heels!”

Another noticeable familiarity, fewer than 24 hours before the Tar Heels take on 13th-seeded Tennessee-Martin in the first round of the NCAA tournament, was the North Carolina state outline stretched across the middle of the floor.

Five players on UNC’s roster were freshmen in 2012 when the NCAA denied UNC an at-large bid, forcing the Tar Heels to watch the first and second rounds be played in Chapel Hill.

This year, UNC claimed a No. 4 seed, receiving the opportunity to host the first two rounds at Carmichael Arena and relish in all that is familiar.

But freshman center Stephanie Mavunga appreciated the only difference in her team’s typical home-game preparation.

Saturday morning, the Tar Heels didn’t wake up in dorms, but in rooms at the Carolina Inn.

“This is the first time we’ve done it ... They can make sure we’re at the room, they can make sure they can take our phones — they can confiscate those,” Mavunga said. “It’s something new, but also, when you think about it, you’re just like ‘Oh, I’m staying in a hotel. I’m focusing, I’m getting ready.’

“You can realize how big a deal this tournament really is.”

If a night at the Carolina Inn didn’t do the trick, a visitor to the hotel Saturday morning reminded the Tar Heel players just how big of a deal the tournament is.

Just as she has done all season long during her absence from coaching after being diagnosed with leukemia in October, Sylvia Hatchell provided her team with some words of encouragement as it heads into battle.

“She told us basically what we need to do — that we all have to come together as a team,” junior guard Danielle Butts said. “And in this type of tournament, it’s not always about who’s talented — it’s all about heart and passion and competitiveness that wins games.

“Obviously, on the men’s side, you can see the higher seeds have been losing. It’s all because the other teams have had that togetherness, they’ve had that fire. So she just told us we’ve gotta play with passion and heart.”

Associate head coach Andrew Calder said Hatchell is not yet ready to return to the sideline, but will occupy her seat in the rafters above UNC’s bench where she’s spent several games this year.

From there, Hatchell will watch her team take on a small, yet talented UT-Martin squad that has just two players over 6-feet tall but averages 84.6 points per game led by two prolific-scoring senior guards.

At just 5-foot-5, Heather Butler enters the tournament ninth in the nation in scoring at 23.7 points a game and has scored in double figures in all 128 games of her career. Standing beside her will be 5-foot-6 Jasmine Newsome, who averages 19.4 points a game but is not just an offensive threat as the Ohio Valley Conference’s Defensive Player of the Year.

But 6-foot-2 UNC guard and espnW’s national freshman player of the year Diamond DeShields isn’t worried.

“They’ve put up some good numbers but they haven’t gone up against our defense yet,” DeShields said. “I know they’ve got some offensive scorers, and I think it’ll be exciting to have that challenge for our defense. And I think we need a challenge like that, especially for our first game, to get ourselves going.

“But I think we’ll step up to the challenge.”

Though the practice routine and arena are the same, sophomore forward Xylina McDaniel realizes her team has entered into an entirely new season.

She knows that the Tar Heels now have the chance to render their nine losses on the season meaningless — that six wins will culminate in their dreams fulfilled.

But to get there, UNC will have to do one thing, summed up by the one word the team broke its opening-practice huddle with Saturday, as the Tar Heels get set to embark on a journey that starts with the Skyhawks.

Sacrifice. 

sports@dailytarheel.com