JEFFERSON CITY, Tenn. – When No. 23 Carson-Newman hits the floor on Saturday against Lenoir-Rhyne, it will be the first game for the Lady Eagles in 35 days, an exhibition contest at Liberty. Game time is scheduled for 2 p.m. against the Bears from Holt Fieldhouse.
"Honestly it has been quite frustrating on our end because we have been dinged twice with positives and luckily all of those have been asymptomatic," Carson-Newman coach Mike Mincey said. "Other teams in our conference have been quite fortunate where they haven't missed a beat. I felt like in the first semester after the Liberty game we were getting there. Practice was difficult because you couldn't go 5-on-5. It's been quite a while to where we had a practice where we could scrimmage."
Mincey's club has played three games on the year, all against the league, winning by an average of nine points in home efforts against Newberry, Anderson and Limestone. The Lady Eagles (3-0, 3-0) are one of 31 clubs in the nation without a blemish on their record joining Tusculum (8-0) and Catawba (4-0) from the SAC.
Offensively, the unit ranks second in the league in scoring at 75 points per game despite shooting 29 percent from long range, eighth in the conference. This comes a year after, C-N was second in the nation in makes and fifth in efficiency. C-N is making 52 percent from inside of the arc and Addison Byrd is 9-for-17 from three-point territory with the rest of the team 8-for-41, 20 percent.
In a small sample size, Carson-Newman has been frontrunners this year holding a lead for 111:11 out of the 120 minutes played on the year. Each second that the team has trailed on the year, 6:40 total, has come in the first quarter. In fact the only time that the club has been tied in the final three quarters came 10 seconds into the fourth frame versus Limestone on Dec. 12, a 65-65 deadlock before the Lady Eagles rattled off 12 unanswered.
"I felt like we were learning a little bit about who we were," Mincey said. "There were some things in the fourth quarter I felt like we improved upon. We were starting to get a rotation, our conditioning was there and that got ripped from us before going to North Georgia. We get three days of 5-on-5 and go back to start playing on Saturday. They know that we aren't going to be practicing a lot assuming we get to play. It's going to be a lot of games, film, rest and recovery."
Saturday's tilt with Lenoir-Rhyne (1-5, 1-5) is the 78th all-time meeting between the two clubs with the Lady Eagles holding a 48-29 overall lead including a 26-10 margin in games played at Mossy Creek. C-N has won each of the last four affairs including eight of the last nine with the lone setback coming on Dec. 5, 2018, a 78-75 loss at Mossy Creek.
Half of those eight victories have been by at least 22 points with the Orange and Blue winning by 22, 36 and 34 over the course of three meetings during the 2019-20 season. C-N crossed the triple-digit threshold twice averaging 96 points making 50 percent of its shots from the field and burying 35 three-pointers.
The Bears are led by first-year head coach Grahm Smith from William Peace where he spent two years going 39-16 in two years with the Division III program. His experience at the Division II level come as an assistant coach for Palm Beach Atlantic and Rockford for a total of five years.
In the preseason SAC coaches' poll, Lenoir-Rhyne was selected to finish 10th with preseason first-team All-SAC pick Madeline Hardy leading the unit. However none of the team's double figure scorers from last year has played this season. Karlie Bearden graduated and Hardy and Kennedy Weigt have not seen the floor so far.
LR has been outscored by an average of a dozen points this season but that is aided by 35-point and 23-point losses to Limestone and Tusculum. Its lone victory this year came on Jan. 9, a 63-54 win over Lincoln Memorial behind 20 points from Emily Harman.
Offensively no team in the league has scored fewer points on average than the 54.8 per game by Smith's group. Harman is the team's leading scorer at 15 points per night scoring in double figures in five of the six affairs including each of the past four. She has also added at least five rebounds in every game including a 12-point, 10-rebound double-double against Tusculum on Dec. 12.
On the other end of the floor, only three teams have scored 70-plus points limiting foes to 66 points per game. Teams are shooting 40 percent. The Bears are 10th in the league in rebounding at 35 per night getting outpaced on the glass by four.
Broadcast coverage for Saturday afternoon's affair starts at 1:45 p.m. with "The AEC Countdown to Tip-Off" on the Eagle Sports Network's flagship station, 106.3 (WPFT-FM, Sevierville), and online with video and audio links on cneagles.com/live.
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