After losing leading playmaker Jaterra Bonds last season to graduation, seemingly nobody is counting on the Florida Gators women’s basketball team to contend this year.
"Preseason rankings came out, and we were nowhere to be found," freshman Brooke Copeland said. "It’s just another thing to motivate us going into the season."
"Kentucky is ranked … and we beat them twice last year. We didn’t even get a vote, it’s just so disrespectful."
The campaign to prove everybody wrong begins today at 3:15 p.m., when the Gators take on Jacksonville in the O’Connell Center. The Gators return six players from a team that lost to Penn State in the second round of last year’s NCAA tournament. With a considerable amount of added depth and height, the Gators are ready to put last season behind them and focus on the task at hand.
"There’s certainly no replacing Jaterra," coach Amanda Butler said. "You’ve seen a lot of people elevate their games, elevate their personalities, elevate their leadership, because they know that there’s a void there."
With Bonds’ absence, the Gators will look to redshirt senior Kayla Lewis and junior Cassie Peoples to fill some of the voids that Butler has seen the team identify. Peoples has spent the offseason improving her shot and defensive intensity to further develop a game reliant on speed to compensate for a lack of height. The team leader in steals last season, Peoples has seen the team take a renewed interest on the defensive side of the ball.
To demonstrate its focus, the team developed an identity for their defense: Hector.
The ensuing camp, dubbed Camp Hector, brought an emphasis on defensive intensity that might have been missing from previous teams. The Gators have given Hector an identity, a personality even. The name was coined from the prefix "hexa," which is also the Greek word for the number six. The Gators want their defense to stifle, smother and force the opposing team to turn the ball over. The team wants opponents to think there’s a sixth Gator on the court playing defense.
"Hector, she’s actually a girl," junior Antoinette Bannister said. "She looks mean, she’s tough, she’s cut, has wild hair."
Camp Hector began before preseason practice, and before the sun came up. For three days before the start of training camp, strength and conditioning coordinator Tyler Stuart gathered the team at 5 a.m., putting the players through a grueling regimen focused on improving their defensive skills and mentality.
There was no basketball, there were no shooting drills.
Only a team putting in extra work to improve a defense that finished second-to-last behind Ole Miss in the Southeastern Conference in scoring defense last year, giving up 70.5 points a game.
Furthermore, the Gators finished last in the SEC in defending the three-point line, allowing opponents to shoot 32.9 percent from long range against them.
A height issue for the Gators resulted in the team often being outrebounded, and giving the opposing team extra possessions.
Florida gave up an average of 40.1 rebounds per game last season while only pulling down an average of 36.1 rebounds per game. With Lewis being the tallest Gator last season at 6-foot, Florida believes it has solved the height issue, as it has added post-playing freshmen Haley Lorenzen and Copeland. Coupled with the return of 6-foot-4 redshirt junior Viktorija Dimaite, the Gators are hoping they’re the team out-rebounding its opponent.
Dimaite, set to finally make her collegiate debut after having her career derailed by numerous injuries, hopes the height brings a new dimension to the team.
The Gators will have an early chance to exploit a team in the post, as they face a Jacksonville team whose tallest player is a 6-foot-2 sophomore.
"I feel like we can block shots, be big on offense and defense," Dimaite said. "We all can shoot and play good post defense, and that’s definitely an advantage for us."
If you combine the lack of roster depth, lack of height and lackadaisical defense, it’s hard to see how the Gators made the NCAA Tournament last year. The players don’t look at it that way — they only see how far they can go this year, after exceeding expectations with less last year.
"Having more people, and having more height, we’re at an advantage because nobody knows what we have," Bannister said. "We have people who can guard in the post and now we won’t be at a disadvantage."
With the season upon them, the Gators are hoping to let their play do the talking. Butler hopes the team owns the image they created in Hector, and continues to place a high level of emphasis on the defensive end.
"They created that image, that presence, that persona, and that gives them a great deal of ownership of how we’re going to play on that end of the court," Butler said.
Follow Graham Hall on Twitter @Graham311
Kayla Lewis (22) guards Missouri's Lianna Doty during the Gators' 81-76 loss to the Tigers on Feb. 20.
