Soon, Dayton point guard Sydney Freeman stood just inside the midcourt line and began to dribble out the clock, the ball rhythmically bouncing back up to her hand, which was adorned by long, bright blue nails.
Only the tip of the right middle finger was different. It was bound with black tape.
“I lost that nail tonight,” Freeman shrugged.
It was the only loss of the night for the Flyers.
And that was a first this season.
Coming into the game with Cedarville on Thursday night at UD Arena, the Flyers were 0-10.
It was the worst start for a hoops team in UD history.
The streak ended with the Flyers’ 94-59 victory, though Cedarville — an NCAA Division II school which had a 2-8 record, had lost 5 in a row and was at a distinct size disadvantage — counted the game as an exhibition.
Those qualifiers didn’t matter to the relieved Flyers players afterward.
“They’re excited,” said head coach Tamika Williams-Jeter. “I don’t know if they understand DII and D-III basketball. For them, it doesn’t matter. It was: ‘We beat somebody and we played a little bit the way coach said for the first time this year.’”
As the final buzzer sounded, the Arena lights flashed off and on to emphasize the moment. Destiny Bohanon met Freeman coming off the court and they jumped and gave each other a body bump to celebrate.
Later, after the handshake line was over and most of her teammates had trekked to the dressing room, 6-foot-2 forward Arianna Smith gathered with her family — her mom and grandmother, two sisters and a little niece — for some courtside photos.
It had been Arianna’s first game as a Flyer after transferring from Indiana State and recovering from a massive knee surgery eight months ago.
She scored 10 points, grabbed eight rebounds and added a burst of energy to a team that at times this season has been sorely in need of it.
As she and her family gathered by the UD bench, her mom, Aisha Smith, was watching another game on her phone. Daughter Alexia, a transfer from Minnesota, was playing at that very moment with the University of Virginia, which would go on to edge Georgia Tech and raise its record to 13-1.
But it’s safe to say the Cavaliers’ postgame dressing room wasn’t any more joyous than was UD’s Thursday night.
“It was lit,” Smith said after leaving the locker room later on.
That too was a first this season.
Williams-Jeter, though, was subdued afterward. An assistant coach even tweaked her a bit about dropping the stoicism of a head coach and enjoying the moment.
But she knows the difference between DI and DII and III and she said she doesn’t want her team to “forget the crap we went through” and the “lessons” that came out of all that.
She made her postgame comments — as did her players before her — outside their Donoher Center dressing room and in front of a gallery of nine large photos of UD teams playing at the various NCAA Tournaments.
In its previous 53 years of women’s basketball, UD has had 42 winning seasons and has made the postseason the past 15 years in row. And that includes 10 trips to the NCAA Tournament.
Most of those tournament efforts were featured on the wall.
There was a photo of a mesmerized Sam MacKay — now a UD grad assistant coach after a stellar Flyers career and long pro career — on the sideline with her UD team that advanced to the second round of the 2010 NCAA Tournament.
Next to that was a picture of Patrice Lalor driving with the ball in the 2011 NCAA Tournament.
Further down the line of images, Andrea Hoover was going in for a lay-up in the 2014 NCAA Tournament.
And the piece de resistance was a gigantic photo of Ally Malott rising up to score over four UConn defenders in 2015 when UD led the Huskies at halftime in their Elite Eight match-up.
After every game this season, the current Flyers would walk past those photos as they made their way from Blackburn Court to their locker room.
Freeman said she rarely noticed them: “My head was always down.”
Smith, who was not playing, saw them though.
“Those are the teams that we’re behind. They were great teams and this is where they started. We’re trying to live up to their legacy.
“At first, with us being 0-10, it was like: ‘Are we really part of them?’ But they probably had veteran teams and longtime coaches and we’re just building.
“And one day we’ll be up there, too.”
‘We showed we can play as a team’
Some of the euphoria from Thursday night’s victory should be tempered because of the mismatch:
Cedarville has just one player over 6-feet — 6-1 Beavercreek High product Anna Landing, who played just 7 1/2minutes — and UD outrebounded the Yellow Jackets, 43-19, outscored them in the paint 50-16 and had a 21-0 margin in second-chance points.
And yet some very real positives emerged for the Flyers.
None more so than the addition of Smith, a Columbus Africentric High School grad, who played in 28 games for Indiana State last season, made 16 starts and averaged 7.2 points per game while shooting 47.4 percent from the floor.
“At first tonight I was a little nervous because I was coming off an injury where I tore my whole right knee out,” she said.
She wore a long white legging on her leg, but not a brace: “My doctor said I didn’t need a brace because he’s a good surgeon.
“And I felt good for the first time this year. I really felt part of the team. When I had to just sit and watch, it was hard. I knew they needed another person. I knew I could help.”
Williams-Jeter agreed:
“Adding a player like (Adrianna) is huge for us. She’s only been back on the floor a little over a month, but she’s a huge addition inside. She can shoot midrange and can shoot the three a little bit, too.
“And she plays with high energy. We need that type of person. And she will stomp and (in no uncertain terms) tell them what we need to do.
“The other players respect her because she does that.”
Leading scorer Destiny Bohanon and 6-foot-3 center Mariah Perez, who is playing the best basketball of her career, are both healthy again.
And Freeman is back on track after missing some early games for “personal reasons,” — the Ball State transfer was awarded a basketball by Williams-Jeter before Thursday’s game for surpassing 1,000 points in her college career — the Flyers are almost whole like never before this season.
Only freshman guard Nayo Lear is still hobbled, but she’ll likely be back for Sunday’s Atlantic 10 opener at George Mason.
“The pieces are finally falling into play,” Williams-Jeter said.
Against Cedarville, four Flyers were in double figures:
Perez had 20 points. Anyssa Jones, an Ohio State transfer, added 19. Smith had 10 and Freeman had a double-double (18 points and 11 assists).
“A shout out to my girl Syd for the way she was passing the ball,” Smith said. “When we struggled at the beginning of the year, we weren’t moving the ball. I’m not saying we were selfish, but we just didn’t play as a team.
“Today we showed we can play as a team.”
‘No confetti’
Before she entered the locker room — even though it was her first victory at UD — Williams-Jeter warned an aide:
“No confetti!”
The coach wasn’t going to overblow a victory over a smaller program, nor was she going to talk about her team now embarking on “a new season” with the beginning of Atlantic 10 Conference play:
“We need to focus on the lessons we’ve learned along the way. If not, if we don’t look back at some of the bad things, and (instead) try to psyche ourselves up with things that (aren’t true) — we’ll be swept in the A-10.”
Yet even the coach had to admit Thursday night was different than the previous 10 games.
Asked if through the frustrations of 7 ½ weeks of losing she had learned any new cuss words, she grinned:
“Yeah one:
“‘#%@& !’”
It was the first time she’d said it all night and this time she didn’t mean it.
And that, too, was a first this season.
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