RALEIGH — It wasn’t the way Elissa Cunane wanted to open her senior season at N.C. State. But the senior from Summerfield did what she does after Tuesday night’s 66-57 loss to top-ranked South Carolina. She stayed positive.
The 6-foot-5 post player was held to eight points on 4-of-11 shooting and grabbed just three rebounds against a big, physical Gamecocks team. Her smile wasn’t quite as big as usual, but it wasn’t just seeing her parents, Sharon and Dan, and older brother Will afterward at Reynolds Coliseum that kept her upbeat.
“I just love what I do,” the Northern Guilford graduate said. “Every day I get to come here to this university and play basketball. I just have to enjoy every day, because I know it’s not going to last forever.”
It may not last forever, but there’s still plenty of basketball to play for Cunane and the Wolfpack, who entered the game ranked No. 5 in the nation. They play three games in four days in the Preseason WNIT at Reynolds, starting Friday evening against Wofford.
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Cunane will go into the weekend thinking about how she was pushed up the lane repeatedly by 6-5 Aliyah Boston and a number of other big bodies for South Carolina and held without an offensive rebound.
“You don’t necessarily let it go,” she said. “You let tonight be tonight, but then you go back in tomorrow, watch film and learn from everything. It definitely hurts to lose.”
N.C. State coach Wes Moore took some of the blame for Cunane’s offensive struggles, saying “we probably should’ve gotten her more touches.”
“Some of our entry passes, maybe we didn’t get the ball low enough on the baseline to feed it back into the post,” Moore said. “Bad angles, that sort of thing.”
But Moore also credited Boston for being “tough down there, very physical. Elissa had a hard time getting open enough to get her shot off.”
As rough as the night was for the Wolfpack in front of a loud, sellout crowd of 5,533 and an ESPN audience, Cunane put the experience of playing against the nation’s No. 1 team in perspective.
“It’s going to make or break us,” she said, “so hopefully it’s going to make us better for the rest of the season.”
The schedule will take N.C. State to the Bahamas later this month for games against No. 4 Maryland and Washington State, and they visit No. 8 Indiana on Dec. 2 in the ACC/Big Ten Challenge. The ACC Tournament returns to the Greensboro Coliseum from Feb. 28-March 4, and the coliseum also will be home to a NCAA regional March 25-28.
“It will be pretty cool to be back there,” Cunane said. “Greensboro is a great atmosphere for the tournament. For regionals, we had a lot of people show up (in 2019). It’s always special when we play there.”
Will this year’s trip(s) to Greensboro be her last as a college basketball player? Cunane has the option to use an additional year of eligibility because of the impact COVID-19 had on the 2019-20 season.
“I’m not going to make any 100 percent decisions right now,” she said. “We’ll just see where the season takes me.”