Maybe it’s just going to take a little more time than expected.

This year’s Syracuse women’s basketball team simply wasn’t ready.

Captains Julie McBride and Shannon Perry will be tremendous leaders. They weren’t this year.

Freshmen Jill Norton and Tierra Jackson will one day be a formidable one-two inside punch. This season, they were less reliable than a cable repairman’s estimated arrival time.

Chineze Nwagbo and Marchele Campbell will play primary roles next year. You played as many minutes as they did this season.

Syracuse will be a good team. This year, it wasn’t.

‘There were just times when they really had dry spells, and they couldn’t score,’ said Miami head coach Ferne Labati, whose team ousted SU, 77-64, in the first round of the Big East tournament March 8. ‘Sometimes when a team gets down, they have a difficult time getting back up.’

When Jaime James and Jazmine Wright graduated after an 18-13 record and an NCAA Tournament appearance last season, they seemingly left the Orangewomen in good hands.

The two freshly anointed captains of this year’s team formed a solid core. Heck, McBride led the NCAA tourney squad in scoring. All signs pointed to a team on the rise.

Instead, the Orangewomen flirted with missing the Big East tournament and compiled a 10-18 record.

How could a team so promising fall to such depths? Coaches and players offered several reasons throughout the year. Turnovers. Rebounds. Missed shots.

Game by game, those were issues. But on the whole, one problem surfaces: youth.

The Orangewomen dressed two seniors, Maja Omanovic and Awa Diop, both of whom are junior-college transfers. Omanovic played in just 11 games, Diop in 19. Their combined average point total — three.

Next season, SU returns 96 percent of its offense.

This season, SU battled inexperience. Syracuse failed to replace three tested leaders in James, Wright and Leaf Newman.

‘They lost a lot of kids (last year),’ Labati said. ‘That was huge.’

The departure of James — SU’s floor general and safety net — hurt most. SU head coach Marianna Freeman and McBride revere James. They speak her name almost wistfully. Once asked about replacing James, McBride said she ‘would never have those expectations’ about anyone.

Without James, the Orangewomen were like a child riding a bike for the first time without training wheels. The onus of failsafe fell to McBride, who gamely took on the challenge but fell short. Under pressure to guide the Orangewomen, she began erring with her once-trusty jumper and handing out turnovers like a bakery.

The solution, of course, is to find another sure-handling, sharp-shooting guard to complement McBride, as James did.

SU won’t have to look far. Campbell — who Freeman calls ‘our Jaime James’ — redshirted this season after failing to meet SU academic standards and will join the Orangewomen next season.

‘It was real difficult to be there and watch the team lose,’ Campbell said. ‘I can help. Scoring-wise, if someone is having a bad shooting day, I can step in and fill the load. Defensively, there’s a lot of quick guards, and I can make some steals.

‘I say I’m like Phil Jackson. I resigned and took a year off, but I’ll be back next year.’

Campbell (along with perhaps a new appreciation for Zen) will have company. Nwagbo, SU’s best inside option, will return from a torn left ACL next season. Her addition will be immeasurable, considering Jackson and Norton showed growing pains. Thoughts of a healthy Nwagbo coupled with a rotation that goes eight or nine deep (as opposed to this year’s seven) make Freeman glow.

‘Oh my gosh, and having Marchele Campbell join us,’ Freeman said. ‘Things didn’t happen the way we wanted to. Fact is, we expected to get a lot from Awa. Illness sets in, and she’s not able to produce. I thought Chineze would certainly be back. Marchele doesn’t make it. Of the talent that we have, a lot of it is sitting here.’

Every day that’s marked off the calendar is a positive for Syracuse. As each day passes this offseason, the Orangewomen move further from this year’s debacle and closer to next year’s possibilities.

‘I’m really excited,’ Campbell said. ‘But I’m nervous. I haven’t played in a year, and I’m ready to get that feeling back. I’m ready to play.’

The rest of the Orangewomen have been playing, but they’re also waiting to get a certain feeling back. They’ve had that feeling before, but they couldn’t recapture it. Next year, they’ll be ready.

Adam Kilgore is an assistant sports editor at The Daily Orange, where his columns appear regularly. You can e-mail him at adkilgor@syr.edu.

Published on March 17, 2003 at 12:00 pm