Jan. 14, 2012

Please Note: The game time Sunday is 1 p.m. (CT) to accommodate ECU's flight after the game. Also, this game will not be broadcast on 91.7 FM due to station renovations that are underway. The audio portion of the broadcast can be heard for out-of-town fans on the All-Access video broadcast.

Memphis Notes vs East Carolina

Tigers vs. East Carolina
This is the 19th meeting between Memphis and East Carolina. The visiting Pirates lead the overall series record, 10-8, however Memphis leads the overall series in Memphis 5-3.

This is the first meeting in three years between the two teams that will be played in the Elma Roane Fieldhouse. ECU upended Memphis two years ago, 77-76, in overtime in a televised C-USA game, then Brittany Carter exploded for 32 points on 12-for-18 shooting in an 83-70 win at the NBA venue last year.

Memphis swept the regular season meetings with ECU last year with an 87-75 win in Greenville before that FedExForum game. Since both teams are in the Eastern division of C-USA, they play a home-and-home each year. Last year marked just the second time in the series that Memphis has won both meetings. ECU owned series sweeps in 2006, 2007 and 2010.

Rare January Home Game
Memphis has just two home games remaining in league play in the month of January. Sunday's match-up with ECU will be the final home game until Jan. 26th, when the Tigers host another East Division foe -- Marshall.

nching Toward Program Win #700
This is the 40th season since women's basketball returned to Memphis as a varsity sport. The team is currently just nine wins shy of the program's 700th overall victory. Heading in to the East Carolina game, Memphis is 691-507 overall.

Debut of New Video Scoreboard
Memphis fans have had new scoreboards to look at for the entire non-conference schedule, but starting Sunday, fans will have the ability to see replays, promotional spots and more game information on the new video component of the board that was installed over the past week. The board was installed by Rainey Electronics of Little Rock. The board has 93,184 LED lights and has added a staff of five behind the scenes just to run the video board component.

Lonlack Looking Grand
Senior guard Ramses Lonlack scored her 1,000th career point on Sunday in the loss at UTEP. With her 1,002 career points, she already ranks 20th in school history in scoring and became just the 21st player in the 40th season of Memphis women's basketball to score 1,000 or more points in a career.

Abdul-Qaadir Improves School Consecutive Free Throws Record
Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir hit a bucket-and-one in the win over Tulane. The free throw she made was her 25th straight make from the line. She added a make following a made field goal in the loss at UTEP to stretch that mark to 26 straight makes from the line.

Her last miss from the stripe was the front end of a one-and-one with 2:24 remaining in the game in the win over Belmont (Nov. 13) in the Tigers' second game of the season. After having no free-throw tries at Illinois or against Arkansas-Pine Bluff, the sophomore has hit everything since, improving to 28-for-29 on the season from the stripe.

Quick Hits:
- Danay Collier has already doubled-up the number of three-point field goals she made last year. She made six last season and has knocked down 12 already this year. She has improved her shooting percentage from beyond the arc to 32.4 percent after shooting 21.4 percent last year while trying to learn the new offense.

- Nicole Dickson has almost doubled her rebounding average. In her freshman and sophomore seasons, she averaged about 4.5 rebounds a night. This year, she is averaging 8.9 boards a night, including a nine-rebound effort in the loss at UTEP Sunday.

- Jasmine Lee had a career-high three steals in the loss at UTEP, which saw her miss six minutes of play when she suffered a knee injury.

- Ramses Lonlack's free-throw attempts per game has dropped this year. After averaging between 3.3-3.7 attempts a game in her first three seasons, she is averaging just 2.5 tries a night as a senior. Part of that is improved field goal percentage from the field. She is shooting a career-best 42.9 percent from the floor so far this season, although that number has dropped as league play has opened and conference opponents are well-versed in Lonlack's game. In C-USA games, she is shooting 23.1 percent so far this season. Last year, Lonlack scored a career-high 21 points in the win at East Carolina, one of two 20-point games in her career.

- Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir scored 10 points in the loss at UTEP on Sunday, including a three-point field goal that cut the Miner lead to two with less than two minutes to play. That was Abdul-Qaadir's second double-digit game of the season and her fifth of her career.

- The UTEP game marked the first game of the season that Abdul-Qaadir was held without an assist.

- Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir has registered a block in each of the last two games. The sophomore point guard is 5-4 and has three blocks this season.

- Danay Collier may have snapped out of a shooting slump, after not shooting over 34 percent in the last six games, she shot 66.7 percent from the floor in the game at UTEP, including a 1-for-1 mark from three-point land.

- The trio of Tiger points guards (Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir, Danay Collier, Lauren McGraw) were all held without an assist in the loss at UTEP, Sunday. Abdul-Qaadir had no assists against two turnovers, McGraw no assists against one turnover and Collier no assists against four turnovers. The four-turnover performance from Collier followed a three-assist against no turnover performance in the win over Tulane.

- Brittany Carter scored 32 the last time Memphis played East Carolina. The Tigers are hoping to have a repeat performance as Carter has battled shooting woes as of late, shooting under 37 percent in four straight games. She has not hit a three-point field goal in any of the last three games as opponents have become familiar with her arsenal of skills heading in to league play.

- Brittany Carter was held to single digit points in each of the last two games. That has not happened since her sophomore year when she scored single digits since games against SMU and UCF. She snapped that single digit streak in a big way, scoring double-digit points in the next 17 straight games while guiding Memphis to the finals of the WBI.

- Nicole Dickson has shot over 50 percent from three-point range in three straight games, including a 3-for-5 stretch against UTEP.

- KK Harvey played a career-high nine minutes in the loss at UTEP, spelling the posts with Ann Jones missing the entire game due to injury, and Jasmine Lee going down for over six minutes with a suspected knee injury. Harvey finished with a career-high four defensive rebounds and worked her way to the free-throw line, where she was 1-for-2.

Front Line of Dickson and Lee Looking for 500 Rebound Marks
Junior forward Nicole Dickson and Jasmine Lee passed benchmark point totals in the win over Tulane, and are both now eyeing the 500 rebound mark. Only 19 other players in Memphis history have had over 500 career rebounds, including teammate Ramses Lonlack (562).

Career Rebounds

1. 	Linda Street		1,452
2.	Regina Street		1,277
3. 	Tamika Whitmore	        952
4. 	Keeta Matthews		926
5.	Kim Duppins		881
6.	Ashley Thornton		713
7. 	LaTonya Johnson	        686
8.	Melissa Abraham	        685
9.	Savannah Ellis		670
	Diane Gray		670
11.	Heather Newlon		646
12.	Raven Rogers		624
13.	Wanda Dillard		611
14.	Shannon Hamp		567
15.	Ramses Lonlack	        562
16.	Kitty Allen		559
17.	Michelle Winrow		548
18.	Vera Webb		547
19.	LaShanya Garner	        524
To Watch:
Nicole Dickson		421
Jasmine Lee		403

Dickson will likely be the next Tiger (following Ramses Lonlack) to hit the 1,000 career point mark. With 14 regular season conference games remaining and at least one conference tournament game on the schedule, Dickson would need to average 11.7 ppg to become the third Tiger on this year's roster to have over 1,000 career points.

The only time a Memphis team had three 1,000 point scorers on the same roster was the 1995-96 season (LaTonya Johnson, Keeta Matthews, Kitty Allen).

Sharing the Basketball
Senior guards Ramses Lonlack and Brittany Carter and sophomore guard Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir rank in the top 10 in Conference USA in assists per game. Abdul-Qaadir ranks second with 3.9 assists a night, Lonlack eighth with 2.9 and Carter ninth with 2.8. Abdul-Qaadir also leads the league in assist-to-turnover ratio (2.0) in her first full season running the point for the Tigers.

Lonlack now has 181 career assists. This season alone, Lonlack has 35 helpers, which is just four shy of the single season total number of assists she had as a sophomore. Her single season best assist number was 54, last year.

Fortieth Season
The is the 40th season that women's basketball has been a varsity sport at Memphis. It's been a bitter sweet celebration, as Elma Roane, the women's athletic director who returned women's sports to varsity status at the university, passed away in September at the age of 93. The Tigers entered the 2011-12 season just 20 wins away from the 700th win in program history. The program's current record heading in to the East Carolina game is 691-507.

In school history, 18 Tigers' teams have won 20 or more games. In the last 10 years, Memphis has just three 20-win seasons, but two of them are the back-to-back seasons under McFerrin.