By Ed Morrone
You can talk until you are blue in the face about how much Tom Pecora lost when Loren Stokes and Carlos Rivera graduated, but the truth is, nobody has lost more than Krista Kilburn-Steveskey.
The head coach of the Hofstra women’s basketball team lost four of her starters from last year, all of whom made her transition from rookie coach to 26-game winner that much smoother. Despite the graduation of Lizanne Murphy, Cigi McCollin, Vanessa Gidden and Lana Harshaw, Kilburn-Steveskey is not using these losses as an excuse for this year’s team.
“It’s a work in progress for sure, but it’s nothing we feel we can’t overcome,” Kilburn-Steveskey said. “I’ve had some experience with young players [as an assistant coach] at James Madison where in one year we were starting four freshmen, so it’s not as if we’re not prepared for the challenge.”
The most successful season in program history seems much further in the rearview mirror without the four seniors, and it certainly will be a transition year for Kilburn-Steveskey and the Pride, who were picked to finish seventh in the CAA preseason poll a year removed from winning 13 conference games and getting to the conference tournament semifinals.
After bowing out to conference juggernaut Old Dominion (who won its 16th consecutive title), Hofstra experienced another first: its first two postseason victories. The Pride knocked off Seton Hall and South Carolina before succumbing to Western Kentucky in the WNIT Quarterfinals, and while Hofstra may not advance that far this season, the players and coaches are aware of what was accomplished and don’t want to wait too long to feel that sense of victory again.
“At this point in time, we’re so focused on moving forward that it’s hard to look back,” said Kilburn-Steveskey, whose team opens up Sunday at home against Iona. “But I got a chance to reflect on last season this summer and it was great to look back on what we accomplished. To have the kind of year we had and to see the kind of reaction we’ve gotten around this community, it was a wonderful feeling.”
With the magnificent quartet of seniors gone, expected to step up are junior Niki Williams and sophomore Sam Brigham, role players on last year’s team that got more minutes as the season progressed.
Williams inherited the starting point guard position from Jeanell Hughes and performed admirably. In 22 starts, Williams averaged 4.6 points, 3.4 rebounds, 2.1 steals and a team-high 3.6 assists per game. Most importantly, she showcased her ability to take care of the basketball, ranking fourth in the CAA in assist to turnover ratio (1.46).
“I had four very talented players around me [last year], so I did a lot of distributing,” Williams said. “Now I know I have to be a scoring threat, so it was important for me to work on my shot a lot this offseason.”
Brigham was initially looked at as primarily 3-point specialist off the bench in her freshman campaign, but her minutes began to increase when she emerged as a tenacious defender. Her 4.4 points and 32.4 percent mark from beyond the three-point arc garnered her a spot on the CAA All-Rookie Team.
“Coach puts me in pressure situations in practice all the time,” Brigham said. “Last year if I screwed up she could rely on someone else, but now she’s letting me know that I have nobody to fall back on and that I’m in the spotlight. I know I have to get my job done.”
Kilburn-Steveskey has certainly been busy in bringing in her first recruiting class, as seven first-year players dominate the roster. Of the five freshmen, the most is expected of Britne Rodgers, who averaged 13.7 points and 7.5 rebounds her senior year of high school. But the biggest name to look out for is that of Jess Fuller, the 6-foot-4 transfer from Monroe Community College that averaged a double-double (13.8 points, 10.9 rebounds) in her sophomore season. The hope is that Fuller, along with frontcourt holdovers Linn Quamme and Kristina Campbell, can help fill the void left by Gidden, Murphy and Harshaw in the paint. Together, that trio averaged 37.2 points and 23.1 rebounds per game last season.
The bottom line is, like the men’s basketball team, extensive personnel losses for the women have ushered in lower expectations from the fans, but not from the team itself. Even though 26 more wins is a severe long shot, Hofstra and Kilburn-Steveskey hope to surprise a few people while playing in the extremely-deep CAA.
“The most important thing I can do as a coach is keep the outside influences out of the players’ heads,” Kilburn-Steveskey said. “Because if things get ugly in the beginning, we’re going to have to hang on. We have to have that vision of when the whole world thinks we can’t do it, we have to be the ones to prove them wrong.”