The women's basketball team began the season with a bang yesterday, romping EA Sports 85-55. The game was the Cavaliers' lone official exhibition game of the year and will not count towards the overall standings.
Senior forward Tiffany Sardin led all scorers with 18 points and 14 rebounds.
Junior guard Brenna McGuire got the scoring started for Virginia, tallying five points in the first 70 seconds, including one three-pointer. She would finish with 17 points on 5-12 shooting, including 4-11 from beyond the arch. McGuire led the Cavaliers last year in long-range shooting, tallying 59 treys.
Behind the strong shooting of McGuire and the presence of Sardin down low, the Cavaliers pulled away to a 38-18 advantage at the half.
"I just wanted to see what our execution looked like," Virginia coach Debbie Ryan said. "I really wanted to see how our team meshed together, I wanted to see our lineups in different combinations and see how our freshmen responded."
It was all Virginia again in the second half, as the Cavaliers turned up the pace on offense, outscoring EA Sports 47-37.
Junior center Siedah Williams and sophomore guard Takisha Granberry each scored 10 points. Williams grabbed seven rebounds as the home team finished with a 43-28 rebounding advantage. For the game, the Cavaliers shot just under 50 percent at 35-71 and were 6-23 (26 percent) on three-point attempts.
Two new faces made debuts for Virginia -- freshmen Lyndra Littles and Britnee Millner. Littles, a forward from Washington, D.C., notched 17 points and six rebounds off the bench. Miller picked up two points in eight minutes.
"I think Lyndra [Littles]'s a player that's really going to be a great player in this program," Ryan said. "She's got to get used to the intricacies of the program. It's hard coming from high school to college, but she's picked things up fairly quickly. You can see she's a really talented kid, and she's going to get a lot of minutes."
If there was any trepidation about the team's performance yesterday, it was only a concern about an occasional let-down on the court.
"We played really hard," Williams said. "There were some times where we kind of got a little lax and did not play with as much enthusiasm as we needed to."
Those lapses, however, were few and far between with sophomore point guard Sharneé Zoll running the show. Zoll finished with four points and seven assists in 34 minutes. The Marlboro, N.J., native was responsible for leading the charge on a number of fast-break points, as the Cavaliers turned strong defense into offense.
Yesterday's game marked the lowest output for EA Sports on their tour of college programs. The team, comprised of former collegiate players, had previously been held to a low of 58 by Georgia Tech. Virginia also harassed the visitors into 22 turnovers. EA Sports is now 0-10 on the tour.
The Cavaliers open the regular season at George Washington Friday. Virginia was picked to finish eighth in the ACC by the media. The Colonials are preseason No. 23 according to Street & Smith and finished 23-9 last season.
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