The Winthrop women’s basketball schedule is out for the 2021-22 season, featuring daunting road games at Duke, Kentucky and Alabama.
“Everyone puts their shorts on just like everyone else,” said head coach Semeka Randall Lay. “The thing we have to go in with is a mindset of probably having some small-time goals to try to achieve in those games.”
The Eagles will start the season on a four-game road stretch, opening against Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium on Nov. 9.
“It’s a tough game. At this level, you have to play those types of games to keep the lights on, so to speak,” Randall Lay said.
“But [it will] provide a great opportunity for our athletes to kind of see where we’re at — almost mimic some of our non-conference games to help us get ready for our conference.”
Randall Lay (who played collegiately at the University of Tennessee and was a member of the 1997-98 team that finished 39-0) never played in Cameron Indoor, but she said she visited when her former coaches Joanne P. McCallie and Al Brown coached at Duke.
“Just walking in there and just watching games on TV and thinking about the experience of how the crowd is amazing and how they’re jumping, especially for the men’s games… I think it’s going to be really cool for our athletes to get that experience.”
Winthrop’s last non-conference game will be against Alabama on Dec. 20, a team that was beaten by Big South member Hampton in 2019, which Randall Lay was quick to point out.
“Sometimes those teams take you lightly, and then they don’t go in there and do what they were ‘supposed to do,’” Randall Lay said.
Last season, Winthrop only competed in three non-conference games before getting into conference play due to COVID-19 scheduling limitations. Randall Lay said having more non-conference games this year (11) will be good for the team.
“We’re gonna learn a lot about ourselves,” Randall Lay said. “It’s a process.
“Some days it’s gonna feel good, and some days it might not, but I think it just gives us more opportunities to teach our group and for our athletes to kind of see themselves as they’re competing against somebody outside themselves.”
Winthrop finished with a 5-15 record against Big South Conference opponents last season while Randall Lay was the interim head coach. The team only had six returning players from the previous year’s squad.
In April, Randall Lay was given the full-time head coaching position. This season she has seven returning players, one graduate transfer and six freshmen.
“I imagine we probably won’t be picked high just because of the turnover within our team, so every game to me is going to be like a championship game — a game that we can figure out how we can get better as a unit,” Randall Lay said.
Randall Lay noted that Big South newcomer North Carolina A&T will pose a new challenge for Winthrop with how athletic its roster is.
“[Their] coach has done a really good job of relying on transfers,” Randall Lay said. “They’ve been able to get transfers from those Power 5s or those high major programs. It’s going to definitely make all of us step our game up in the conference.”
Randall Lay also said she expects NC A&T to “full-court press like crazy,” which will test how well Winthrop can value and take care of the basketball.
Since very few people were allowed to attend games last season, Randall Lay said she is excited to host fans in Winthrop Coliseum again, and she hopes the community will come to show support for the team.
“I played at Tennessee. We had 24,000 people in my era, and the energy it brought to me — I believe it could be the same here in our environment.”
Winthrop’s first home game will be on Nov. 24 when the Eagles host Coker University.
