Story By: Sol Tucker
Photos By: Sol Tucker
College Park, MD–
We are two games into the 2025-26 Maryland Women’s basketball season, and it appears that Head Coach Brenda Frese has what it takes to live up the #10 pre-season rankings as tonight against UMBC, while it was a little slow from the start, the, 87-54 final was mostly finished by midway through the third quarter.
One of the big notables tonight is they have a lot of scrappy players to make up for not as much size in the line-up and it caused 21 turnovers tonight. One major fixable problem… there was their fair share of offensive struggles that had this been a conference game, could have had the opposite result for a final score. The second half recovery was much of what we have seen from the Terps before.
A key stat tonight that doesn’t sit well with any of us who have watched this team for quite a few years now is the 8 for 26 from long range. Frese needs to find a combination that works, as quite a few of these shots were uncontested from long range.
The Terps had four players in double figures tonight led by Oluchi Okananwa and Isimenme Ozzy-Momodu with 15 points and Yardan Garzon and Saylor Poffenbarger with 12 and 11 points.
Maryland is going to look from a lot from Poffenbarger, as she is one of the few returning players from last year that has the long-range potential, but suffered some setbacks last season from injury and never was a factor in several big games late in the season. Her accuracy to start the season has been much better and she did talk about working on that part of her game in the offseason. She made three of her four 3-point attempts tonight, which makes her 6-of-7 from deep on the season through two games.
After the game, Frese acknowledged some of the early struggles and hopes that she can get those worked on in the first few games. If the Terps are able to show more of those 14-0 runs they had to start the second half, this will be a dominant team. If they play like they did against a very average UMBC team to start, it’s going to be a long year.
“I thought we needed to settle in a little bit. You know, we had good looks, but we weren’t hitting well from the three. So just trying to get ourselves more to be a little bit more patient,” Terps Head Coach Brenda Frese said.
Maryland improves to 14-0 all-time over UMBC, 6-0 at the Xfinity Center and 8-0 in the Frese era.
