All of the ACC Women’s Basketball Coaches had an opportunity to hop on a Zoom call and chat with reporters on Monday, including Pitt women’s basketball head coach Tory Verdi.
Verdi’s turn came prior to the Panthers departing for Greensboro Coliseum for its first-round contest in the ACC Tournament against No. 10 Georgia Tech Wednesday at 3:30 p.m.
“It’s a new season with a new opportunity, clean slate,” Verdi opened. “We’ll go down there and try to get a win. We’re trying to recover from some injuries here and there. Anything is possible so we’re looking forward to getting down there and competing.”
Verdi caught some headlines following a since-deleted tweet apologizing to Pitt women’s basketball fans for a lack of effort and promising fans will not see that next season, when reflecting on Sunday afternoon’s 84-58 senior day loss to Boston College in the regular season finale at the Petersen Events Center.
Mitchell Northam of WUNC asked about the deleted tweet and Verdi was up front in the response.
“We did not play up to the level of my expectations, and I felt like we let go of the rope,” Verdi explained. “We didn’t compete, and I expect our team to, regardless of what the score is, to compete for 40 minutes. I said we’ll look different next year, meaning the next time that our fans get to see us play at ‘the Pete,’ it’s not going to look like this, so that’s exactly what I meant. Again, at the end of the day, my expectation is regardless of what the score is, you compete every possession like it’s the last possession of the championship game.”
A clear bright spot to this season has been senior forward Liatu King’s play. King averaged 18.8 points and 10.4 rebounds a game and her 18 double doubles are the most in program history. That King averaged more than 10 rebounds per contest makes her the first Pitt player to accomplish that since Jen Bruce 40 years ago.
As Verdi explained it, he evaluated talent and strength and saw that there some things King could do with the ball. It was his decision to run the team’s offense through her and set out to do that while building her confidence.
“She shoots a very high percentage around the basket so I would be crazy not to put her in positions where she could go to work,” he deduced. “There’s been side conversations of what we need from her, and she needs to have a scoring mentality. I’m not sure she had that early on, it’s something that’s been developed. She understands that every time she gets the ball, she has to go to score. Through the season especially early on, she started to figure things out and it took off. All of that allowed her to get confidence that she can do this, and she can belong. I’m really proud of her and her efforts this year.”
Pitt’s record to date stands at 8-23 and 2-16 in ACC play as it finished last in the conference with Wake Forest, who held the tiebreaker with their win just a little less than two weeks prior. Even so, Verdi believes that record does not believe that it reflects how his team has performed.
“We’ve competed and yes we didn’t get the wins, but we were able to do something,” concluded Verdi. “When you look at our roster compared to other ACC rosters yeah, we don’t have the size, the speed and the athleticism but we also figured out how we can put ourselves in the position to compete. I’m proud of our preparation and what we did, now it’s moving forward and trying to get some players who have that ACC skill set. I’m proud of the fight that we’ve had, and it doesn’t show up in the wins column, but I think we gave it our all besides a handful of those games.”
