UNC Wilmington women’s basketball coach Adell Harris has a vision for her program, and this year her mission is simple: to breakthrough. 

Entering her third season as coach, Harris’ first couple of years on the job has been eye-opening in both positive and negative lights. While she enters her third year with a record of 11-54, statistics only tell partial truths. 

During her first season, Harris, who formerly coached at Division II Tusculum College before being hired in April 2012 at UNCW, had a depleted roster, signing only Kelva Atkins in her first recruiting class. Last season, Harris had a full recruiting class, which included six freshmen and four transfers, but only the freshmen and Kelva were eligible to play. 

But now the parts are in place, and Harris and the Seahawks look to return UNCW to the success it saw under previous coach Cynthia Cooper-Dyke, who won Colonial Athletic Association Coach-of-the-Year honors and brought UNCW to the WNIT in 2011 and 2012.

“The parts are still young,” Harris said. “The parts are still unproven because we haven’t had success yet on game day, so there are still some question marks. We still have a lot to prove, but we don’t have so many things working against that, so many challenges to fight that make it almost mission impossible. We have the tools; we have the pieces, to be right in the picture.”

The Seahawks have a favorable schedule this season, which is something that Harris made a priority this year after two years of road-heavy schedules against top opponents across the country. For Harris, learning how to win at home is one of the key elements to her program’s ability to compete at the top of the league. 

“I think any championship program, any championship team, understands the value of winning home games,” Harris said, “We want to have an identity in this building and excitement with our fans, so we’re going to do a lot of things here with our home schedule to make sure that the environment is good and that we value the opportunity to play here and compete here and win here.”

The Transfers

While senior Kelva Atkins has spent time playing point guard in Harris’ system, this year she will have the opportunity to shift to her natural position of shooting guard with the addition of Shatia Cole, a transfer from Coastal Carolina who sat out all last season, to the roster. 

Cole is the only true point guard on the roster and will be key to the team’s success this year, not only by producing on her own, but allowing her teammates opportunities to succeed as well. 

“If she’s (Cole) in the lineup and plays well, we succeed,” Harris said. “Kelva can just go play now, and it takes pressure off Brie Mobley. So they can be in their natural positions and be the best that they can be, and that’s what point guards do.”

Coach Harris expects the transfer students to contribute, but she also knows that there is a learning curve for them readjusting to the college game.

“Any time you sit out and don’t play for a year there’s going to be some sort of adjusting to get yourself back into the rhythm of things, so it’s not going to be instant,” Harris said. “What they’re going to give us instantly is a more competitive practice environment and depth on game day, but they’ll still make some mistakes—it’s not a finished completed project. My goal is in mid-January and February to feel really good about what we’ve done up to that point.” 

Along with Cole, transfers Jasmine Steele from the University of Alabama, Sarah Myatt from Queens University of Charlotte, and Jordan Henry from Iona, Harris has a plethora of new options going into this season, and the added depth to the roster allows her to change her offensive and defensive game planning.

“Last spring we started implementing a new half-court offense that we’ll run—it’s totally different that what we’ve done,” Harris said. “Defensively, we’re going to do things a lot different—not conceptually, but just doing more: more pressure on the ball defensively, playing faster on offense because we have subs and can rest people when they’re tired, just different things like that that we’re able to do now that we weren’t able to do before.”

Jordan Henry, redshirt-sophomore forward, is a large component to Harris’s new offensive approach. Last season one of the biggest weaknesses for UNCW was three-point shooting. The Seahawks shot just under 20 percent from behind the arc, going a combined 80-for-404, while allowing opponents to shoot 33.5 percent from long range (161-for-480). 

Standing six-foot three-inches, Henry might not seem as if she were the likely candidate to help give the Seahawks needed help with three-point shooting, but she sees her size as an advantage. 

“I’ve always been able to shoot the ball,” Henry said. “That’s been my focus, especially during my redshirt year. I’d work out with coach Moore a lot, and we’d get in the gym a lot and work on three’s. I can do other things as well, but three-point shooting for my height is a really big thing, and if I’m capable of doing it, it’s a really great trait to have.”

Last season, a thin roster crippled the Seahawks. Near the end of games, attrition would set in, and the score would drift further apart. Aside from the addition of a true point guard, a three-point shooter, speed and ball handling with Jasmine Steele and additional size with Sarah Myatt, the transfers help solve a fundamental problem that buried the Seahawks last season: depth. 

“We’ve listed the games that we let get away from us in the last three minutes, and that number is large,” Harris said. “It’s between 10 to 12 games that we were right there in the last three minutes, but we couldn’t finish it for whatever reason. I think that we should be in better position to do that this year, whether it’s our ability to practice some late-game situations more—you’re not really able to do that with only six or seven people playing—and then, obviously, depth.”

Experienced Sophomores

During their first season playing college basketball last year, UNCW’s six returning sophomores had a unique experience in which they all saw significant amounts of minutes. While the Seahawks went 5-26, Adell Harris’s first full recruiting class earned valuable game experience on the court, which helped the young players grow up quickly. 

“It gives us experience,” sophomore forward Ryan Flowers said. “With only being sophomores, I feel like now we know what to expect, and we’re not going in blind like we did last year. I feel like we can show the freshmen, or even the redshirts that didn’t play, how this league goes and how the CAA does things.”

As a freshman, Flowers started all 32 games as the primary post player for the Seahawks. She also led the team in rebounding with 247 total boards, averaging 7.7 a game while scoring 6.6 points per game. In addition to Flowers’ on-court success, guard Brie Mobley earned a spot on the CAA All-Rookie Team after averaging 11.7 points per game and grabbing 4.3 rebounds per game. 

As a team, however, the Seahawks weren’t pleased with the outcome of last season, but during the learning process, the seven-person roster kept their sights on the positives. 

Near the end of the season, the Seahawks took a trip to Virginia in which they played William & Mary and James Madison University, the eventual conference champions, in a 48-hour stretch. It was a snowy weekend, and UNCW was in the midst of a five-game losing streak and had dropped eight of its last 10 games.

The Seahawks lost both games by a combined score of 189-87, and the 97-44 loss to William & Mary came after UNCW had beaten the Tribe in Wilmington weeks earlier. It was a moment in which Harris’s team could have easily lost hope, called it a season and started looking forward to the offseason.

Instead, the Seahawks kept fighting, and the six freshmen on last year’s team made a silver lining out of an all-but-lost season. During the CAA Tournament, UNCW defeated William & Mary, 67-65, in the opening round, and played James Madison the closest it had all season in the second round before the Bulldogs ended their season in a 69-56 victory over UNCW.

“I liked the toughness our kids showed to finish out the year,” Harris said. “They definitely could have had a quitter’s mentality, but we didn’t. We went in their swinging in the conference tournament and got better. … I was very proud of that growth and that development. That’s just toughness.”

Flowers turned in one of her strongest performances in the victory over William & Mary during the CAA Tournament, scoring 10 points and grabbing 15 rebounds. 

Over the offseason, Flowers worked to put herself in a position to help her team reach its goal of competing for a CAA Championship. 

“I feel like I’ve gotten a lot stronger,” Flowers said. “I know that I was going up against grown women or females who are older than me [last season], and I knew that was something I needed to work on during the summer and during the preseason.”

On November 16, when UNCW steps on to the court at Trask Coliseum for its first game of the season, the Seahawks will have a wealth of experience and a new found source of depth, which Harris hopes will help her program move closer to its goals of winning a CAA Championship and becoming a top mid-major program.  

“I have a vision for where I want this program to be,” Harris said. “I have a vision for the way I want to coach a game, and how I want my team to play, and it’s hard when you can’t actually get there yet. 

“But we knew we would get there, and we have an opportunity to do the things we wanted to do since we got here, and I’m ecstatic.”