Rochelle Coleman and Jessica Richter were moving the ball up and down the court at Manley Field House on Tuesday morning at the Syracuse women’s basketball practice. During a scrimmage, the two guards were up against a press with an extra sixth defender.

Head coach Keith Cieplicki attempted to simulate the pressure his team will face tonight at Manley at 7 against No. 10 Rutgers.

The Scarlet Knights (18-5, 9-2 Big East) dealt SU (11-12, 3-9 Big East) a 69-61 loss on Feb. 16 at the Louis Brown Athletic Center, forcing 26 Orange turnovers. Coleman and Richter were the biggest culprits, coughing the ball up nine and five times, respectively. So it raises the question, which press is harder to break: six SU players, or five Rutgers players?

‘Rutgers,’ Richter said.

‘Rutgers,’ Coleman said. ‘They were the first team that really pressured us 94 feet. We played defense really well last game and we shot ourselves in the foot because we turned the ball over so many times.’

‘(Rutgers is) very aggressive defensively,’ Cieplicki said, ‘and they play physical all over the floor. We shot the ball really well. We really executed our offense when we got into our offense as well as we did all year. But there were too many lay-up drills for them.’

In the first meeting, the Orange shot a sizzling 16 for 24 from the field and 6 for 8 from behind the 3-point line in the second half. Richter had 17 points and 10 rebounds to counter her turnovers, while Chineze Nwagbo and Vaida Sipaviciute both had double-digit scoring outputs.

While Sipaviciute, Richter, and freshmen classmates Mary Joe Riley and Amanda Adamson all see significant court time for SU, Rutgers gets major contributions from a pair of freshmen. Matee Ajavon is a four-time Big East Freshman of the Week, and leads her team in scoring at 13 point a game. Ajavon scored nine points in the first meeting, as did classmate, Essence Carson.

‘They’re really athletic,’ Cieplicki said. ‘They’re all that and they can make shots.’

Coleman remembers times when the Scarlet Knights didn’t make shots but it didn’t matter.

‘Even before I came here (to Syracuse) when I used to watch them when I was younger, you just think defense,’ she said. ‘They used to be my team. They were good. When you watched them, they were all over the place. They had long arms, they were tall and they pressured everybody to death. They could go and not score for 12 minutes, but you weren’t scoring either.’

Syracuse will try to stay close and not succumb to early lapses like in past games. It has won the last two games against Rutgers at Manley, the last being a 59-57 overtime victory last season. Richter knows the game will depend on fixing the mistakes and not creating new ones.

‘We communicated really well on defense and rotated,’ she said of the first game. ‘We were with them the whole way, and should’ve won the game but we turned the ball over too many times.’

So does Cieplicki think his six-person press is tougher?

‘We’ll find out tomorrow,’ he said. ‘A lot of it is a mindset. We have to go in and just be good with the ball and not let the idea of the pressure hurt us more than the pressure itself.’

Published on February 15, 2005 at 12:00 pm