Super Sophs

DURHAM, N.C. - Joanne P. McCallie's Duke women's basketball team ended last season shy of depth, ball-handling and perimeter shooting. A series of transfers and injuries left her with six ACC-quality players, enough to get Duke to the Sweet Sixteen, where they fell to former ACC rival Maryland.

Duke ended 23-11, the most losses since 1997 against a brutal schedule designed to be contested by a different team than actually showed up.

Fast-forward nine months and those concerns have been addressed by the nation's top recruiting class, five-deep, all perimeter players.

Freshmen Haley Gorecki, Crystal Primm and Faith Suggs are all ranked in the middle of the top 100. Early returns suggest that the first two might be undervalued. Gorecki was the Illinois prep player of the year. She's a 6-0 guard with a skill set and basketball IQ reminiscent of a young Georgia Schweitzer. Primm is a physical, 5-11 attack-first wing. The 6-1 Suggs is the most likely of the newcomers to play some forward.

Kyra Lambert is a top-10 prospect, a jet-quick 5-9 point guard whom McCallie compares to Jasmine Thomas. She says Lambert needs to learn how to do more than just use her speed. But she's going to play early and often.

That leaves Angela Salvadores, a 5-9 Spanish import who exploded into the limelight two summers ago when she torched the U.S. team for 40 points in the 2014 FIBA U17 title game. One national magazine picked Salvadores to be the national freshman of the year. McCallie has high praise. “She's pretty special. She's a unique passer and she can shoot the three with her eyes closed. She's got a really keen sense of the game.”

It may take some time for those qualities to become manifest. Salvadores played for her national team last summer, fighting through a nagging foot injury. She's a long way from home and English is her second language.

Duke shut her down much of the fall to give her time to get healthy and adjust. But it's more important to have a fresh Salvadores in March than an up-to-speed Salvadores in November.

As good as the freshmen might be, the team will run through sophomores Rebecca Greenwell and Azura Stevens, both first-team (10-player teams) preseason All-ACC picks.

Greenwell is a 6-0 redshirt sophomore. She sat out her true freshman season after knee surgery but led the team with almost 35 minutes per game last season, allaying any concerns about her health. Greenwell is a shooter who was forced into a ball-handling role she wasn't fully prepared for (107 turnovers).

But her time at the point should pay dividends as she plays more off the ball, with a better handle turning her into more of a scorer than just a shooter.

Greenwell says she expects to benefit from the influx of young perimeter players. “I'll have a lot more flexibility and be able to score in different ways,” she notes.

Stevens may have the team's highest ceiling. She's not a finished product. Her ball-handling is a work in progress, she made less than 60 percent of her foul shots last season and she lacks a consistent face-up jumper.

But Stevens is 6-6 and does things that 6-6 women simply do not do. She gets to the rim with regularity, beats guards down the court in transition and attacks the glass. Put her large frame at the point of a zone press and she swallows up opposing ball-handlers.

Stevens starred last summer for the USA gold-medal winning U19 team in Russia, starting every game for an 8-0 squad and scoring 18 points in the title game against the host team.

“It was really fun to play with and compete against some of the best players in the country and the world,” Stevens says. “One of the main takeaways was to be competitive every day, not separating practice and games, really understanding the importance of practice, of being goal-oriented, of working towards a championship every day. I was needed to be more aggressive and I want to take it from there.”

McCallie sees the same maturation. “She got so much more experience. I think she got stronger mentally and physically. This year she'll continue to be that player that we use everywhere, from the inside and out. She'll be hitting threes and posting up on the blocks. We'll be moving her around a lot because she's going to be double-teamed, so we're going to have some very good spacing on the floor to give her some help. But I just see her game growing. That's a 6-6 guard/forward and that's impressive and she's owning that.”

McCallie says the two precocious sophomores have emerged as mentors.

“What they do for the program is substantial. There's always something to do to be better, to be hungry. Becca and Azura are hungry and that filters down to the younger players.”

That still leaves the center spot. Gone is All-America Elizabeth Williams, an elite rim protector who was the ACC defensive player of the year four times. Williams ended her career ninth on the NCAA career blocks list, while adding 14.5 points and nine rebounds.

Juniors Kendall Cooper and Oderah Chidom will be in the frontcourt mix. Cooper might be the team's best true center. She scored 21 points in an ACC Tournament win over Wake Forest last season and followed with 12 combined points in four subsequent games, tribute to both her potential and inconsistency.

Like Cooper, Chidom is 6-4 and may be best suited to play a combo forward. She's an excellent shooter inside — 56.6 percent from the field last season — and is fully recovered from shoulder surgery that ended her season in February.

Promising 6-3 center Lyneé Belton is rehabbing after knee surgery and has a steep learning curve after playing only 66 minutes last season. She's a redshirt freshman, should be fully healthy by midseason and could be a wild card down the stretch.

Senior guard Mercedes Riggs and sophomore post Erin Mathias also return, giving Duke 13 players on the roster — and nobody has a 13-player rotation. McCallie acknowledges the possibility of bruised egos but argues that competition will help the team.

“We'll see how that goes. It's a challenge we all welcome. If you're going to have a championship team, you'd better have options, you'd better have people able to step up. It's a competitive cauldron and they all understand that.”

The team is young. “We're nowhere near where we want to be,” McCallie says. “You can't rush it. The process is the process. They're willing to work. They're willing to get better.

“We want to blend an inside game and an outside game. We've been a pressing team seven of the eight years we've been here and we want to get back to that this year. Our presses will take more intensity. We have more bodies, so we don't have to worry about fatigue. If there's one thing we've learned, we're not going to put the ball in one pair of hands. We're going to change it up.”

Duke was picked fourth in the ACC preseason poll and 12th in the national coaches poll — not what Duke has been accustomed to, but a solid jumping off point for a bounce-back season.

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Players Mentioned

Oderah Chidom

Kendall Cooper

Haley Gorecki

Rebecca Greenwell

Kyra Lambert

Erin Mathias

Crystal Primm

Mercedes Riggs

Angela Salvadores

Faith Suggs

Elizabeth Williams

Duke information