The Tribune

By BRENT STUBBS

Senior Sports Reporter

bstubbs@tribunemedia.net

VALERIE Nesbitt, now in the starting line-up at point guard, came through with a big individual game, but it came on the losing end as the University of Mississippi Lady Rebels women’s basketball team fell to the University of Florida Gators 78-68.

Nesbitt, in her senior year, had a side high 18 points and a game high seven assists, along with a rebound to pace the Lady Rebels, coached by Grand Bahamian Yolett ‘Coach Yo’ McPhee-McCuin.

Sunday’s loss at The Pavilion at Ole Miss dropped the Lady Rebels to a 7-5 win-loss record and 1-5 in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) as Nesbitt shot 8-for-12 from the field in 29 minutes.

McPhee, named the Rebels’ ninth head coach on April 4, 2018 and the first black female head coach in Ole Miss women’s basketball history, said she’s hoping to get the Lady Rebels back on track after losing their fourth straight game.

“Right now the season is going as expected,” said McPhee-McCuin, who is now in her 16th year as a coach. “We’re the tenth youngest team in the country and we just completed 12 games. “If we were not in a COVID-19 season, we would be playing pre-season still because pre-season would be 13 games before we get into conference play.”

Due to Covid-19, which has hampered the progress of sports around the world since March 2020, McPhee-McCuin said they were forced to jump right into the regular season.

“Usually this time, you would have seen enough and gathered enough data so you would decide who you are and where you are going to be moving forward,” she lamented.

“But Val has worked extremely hard to earn the starting spot. She’s my starting point guard. She’s steadily learning and growing everyday, so as long as she continues to have great energy, he’s going to be one of the reasons why we will start seeing our success in the win column.”

The 5-feet, 9-inches Nesbitt has played in 11 games so far this season, averaging 18.6 minutes per game with a 7.6 scoring average from a total of 84 points as she has shot 31-for-67 from the field for an average of .436 and 22-for-30 from the free throw line for .73 average.

Nesbitt, who transferred from Chipola College to Ole Miss for the start of her junior year, has also pulled down a total of 23 rebounds for an average of 2/1; dished out 43 assists and 17 steals, while committing 24 fouls with 23 turnovers.

This is the second game that Nesbitt, the 22-year-old daughter of Marina Nesbitt, has been in the starting line-up and McPhee-McCuin expect that the general business major will close out the season in that spot.

McPhee-McCuin, the daughter of legendary coach Gladstone ‘Moon’ McPhee and now married to Kelly McCuin and the mother of two daughters, Yasmine and Yuri, said she likes the position that her Running Rebels are in.

“If people had followed this process last year, once we got into conference, we were getting our head beat in by 50-60 points,” said McPhee-McCuin of their 7-23 overall record and 0-7 mark in the SEC.

“We figured it out and started turning things around and now we’re in a situation where instead of getting blown out, we’re losing close games. We had three games we had a chance to win at the end and we just didn’t make the shots.”

Had they succeeded, McPhee-McCuin would feel as if their record could have been 10-2 right now. But she’s pleased at where they are, considering the fact that they started out the year on a six-game winning streak before they suffered their first loss.

“We only had two losses where I thought we really got beat against Missouri (86-77 on January 14) and Georgia (73-57 on January 17). But all these other teams, we were neck and neck and we fell short,” she stressed.

“Why? It’s the maturation of a young team. At some point we have to grow because we are in the SEC, the toughest conference in the USA.”

The Running Rebels will be back in action on Thursday on the road when they take on the 25th ranked University of Tennessee Volunteers, who are 10-3 and 4-1 in the SEC and then on Sunday, they will face Louisiana State University Tigers in a rematch.

LSU, who are 6-7, and 4-3 in the SEC, handed Ole Miss their first loss of the season on January 4 with a 77-69 decision in overtime at home at The Pavilion at Ole Miss.

McPhee-McCuin, who spent the previous five seasons with the Jacksonville Dolphins prior to coming to Ole Miss, said the expectations for the remainder of the season is for her Running Rebels to grow.

“The expectations for us to compete and get better defensively,” she summed up. “We’re scoring enough points to win games, but we’re not getting enough stops

“So we have to do a better job of getting stops and important times. There are times when we are not getting stops in important times whether we take a bad shot or a quick shot or we just have a defensive mishap.”

Once they can clean up their play, McPhee-McCuin said she’s not going to rush the process as this is a new team. She’s confident that they’re close to turning the corner in conference play.

For McPhee-McCuin, it’s only a matter of time before they get there with Nesbitt leading the charge on the court as her starting point guard.

McPhee-McCuin is hoping the Bahamian duo combo will prevail when they head to the SEC Tournament, scheduled for March 3-7 in Greenville, South Carolina.

This is not the first time that McPhee-McCuin and Nesbitt have been together.

They both represented the Bahamas on the women’s national basketball team as coach and player respectively when the Bahamas won the first Caribbean Basketball Confederation title in 2016 with a perfect 5-0 record.

McPhee-McCuin, a former player in Grand Bahama and a point guard on the national team, was the first Bahamian female to sign a division one basketball scholarship to play with the Jacksonville Dolphins.

In 2016, she was inducted into the Bahamas National Hall of Fame, along with fellow Grand Bahamians Chavano ‘Buddy’ Hield of the Sacramento Kings in the NBA and Jonquel Jones of the WNBA’s Connecticut Suns. She was also inducted into the New England Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013 as one of the 10 recipients of the Pathfinder Award for their distinguished achievement outside of New England.