CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- In a lot of ways, Duke's game against North Carolina Saturday night was kind of weird.
If you hold the final box score up to the light the right way, it looks like the Blue Devils shouldn't have won. If you squint the other way, it seems like Duke should have blown the Tar Heels right out of the Dean Dome.
Coach Gail Gostenkors' team shot almost 50 percent from the field and tied a school record with 12 three-pointers, yet it let North Carolina shoot almost as well. Duke forced the Tar Heels to commit 17 turnovers, but the Blue Devils ended the game with a minus-13 rebounding margin and allowed the hosts easy access to what seemed like dozens of shots from the interior.
The crowd was bigger than normal to say the least--at 10,278, the biggest ever for a women's game. At times, led by the Duke fan section, which kept Duke cheers reverbertaing the entire night, the building was eerily loud considering most of the upper deck was full of empty seats and not screaming and cheering fans, a la Cameron Indoor Stadium. Throw in the extremely physical nature of the game that seemed to feature multiple bodies hitting the floor on almost every possession, and it adds up to an interesting night.
Nonetheless, Duke won, and the Blue Devils would not have escaped with their 11th straight victory over their arch-rival if not for the play of their senior trio of Alana Beard, Iciss Tillis and Vicki Krapohl.
Whatever combination of poise, wisdom and maturity that seeps into a player's body and mind after four years of playing for a program like Duke was on display Saturday night. The aforementioned three scored 65 of the team's 89 points, made momentum-killing or momentum-starting shots at the right time and didn't allow themselves to lose for the first time in their collegiate careers to North Carolina.
Beard and Tillis get the most ink of the three, but it was Krapohl who had the most noteworthy night.
The senior guard from Mount Pleasant, Mich., scored a career-high 20 points on 6-of-10 three-point shooting and collected four assists and one steal. It was the second career-setting game in a week for the mechanical engineering major after Krapohl scored 18 points last weekend against Georgia Tech.
In the days following Duke's upset loss to Florida State several weeks ago, after Gostenkors examined each of her players' roles, Krapohl was, simply put, encouraged to shoot more.
"I'm really proud of Vicki," Goestenkors said. "We talked to her when we redid the roles of the team a couple of games ago and told everybody that we wanted her to search for her three. That's different than just taking the open three; she needed to start to search for it because she is such an excellent shooter, and we need that from her." Having to force Krapohl to shoot more from the outside might seem like a pointless excercise because if standing 5-foot-5 and being a mechanical engineering major wasn't atypical enough, Krapohl is a statistical phenomenon.
Over 90 percent of her baskets are three-pointers, of which she makes 45 percent of her attempts. She has made five two-point field goals total thus far in 2004 in the statistic worth mentioning catergory and shoots a surprisingly low 63 percent from the free-throw line.
And she does all this from the bench this season, with sophomore teammate Lindsey Harding having assumed the point guard role Krapohl has held the last two years, something that has not dampened the senior's season at all, she said.
"I think in the last three games in particular, she's really been doing that, seeking out her three," Goestenkors said. "This was a big game, and I think Vicki did not want to lose to North Carolina her senior year, and I think she just really stepped up for us. I'm proud of her and happy for her."
Gostenkors giving her the green light to shoot gave her confidence, said Krapohl, and being far from the focus of the opposing team's defense also makes things a bit easier.
"We have so many great players that they can't stop everything," Krapohl said. "When Alana [Beard] is driving or Lindsey [Harding] is driving and we get the ball inside to Mistie [Bass] and Iciss [Tillis] it is just really hard to stop everything. And today I got wide open looks and I was just able to knock them down."
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