Nursing a lower leg injury, Middletown High School grad Saylor Poffenbarger didn’t play in either of the Maryland women’s basketball team’s preseason games.
But Terps coach Brenda Frese said Poffenbarger would be ready to go for the Terps’ season opener at UMBC on Monday.
“We’ve been smart with it,” Frese said. “There’s no reason to rush her back for exhibition games.”
Better to wait for the real thing, and it’s been quite a long wait.
Poffenbarger, a redshirt junior, is about to make her official debut with a Maryland program that offered her a scholarship before she began her high school basketball career nearly seven years ago.
“I’m definitely excited,” she said. “It probably will come with some nerves, but just being able to be here representing my home state is really special.”
Flooded with offers from Division I coaches who prized her combination of post player size and guard skills, Poffenbarger began her collegiate career at UConn, women’s basketball’s preeminent program, but transferred to Arkansas as a redshirt freshman.
Poffenbarger enjoyed two stellar seasons with the Razorbacks, winning SEC honors and setting a team rebound record. But after last season, she entered the transfer portal and chose her native state’s flagship school.
“It feels like just coming home,” she said. “I think the biggest thing is just the connection with the coaches and coming home, being able to be 45 minutes from home.”
That proximity has allowed her to come back to Frederick County this fall to watch her younger brother, Brittin, play football for Middletown High.
Her connection to Terps coaches, meanwhile, goes way back. In fact, Frese was at Middletown High on Dec. 5, 2017, when Poffenbarger, a freshman at the time, made her varsity debut. Maryland and several other programs had already offered the precocious player scholarships by that point.
“We were Saylor’s first [scholarship] offer, so she’s someone that I’ve known since a really young age, her and her parents,” Frese said. “Obviously, a full circle moment to be able to bring her back in her last two years to come back and represent her home state, her home university, and a dream come true to finally be able to coach her.”
In the 6-foot-2 Poffenbarger, Maryland gets a player who’s just as comfortable draining 3s as she is crashing boards. Doing such things in high school is one thing, but her continuing development allows her to do them consistently at the Division I level.
“She’s going to kind of be a small forward, a versatile guard for us, we can play her inside and out,” Frese said. “So she’s going to be someone that she can shoot the 3, she can score it, she can rebound it, great size, she’s going to bring a lot to the table.”
That’s just what Poffenbarger did at Arkansas. Last season, she put up 14 double-doubles and averaged a team-high 11.2 rebounds along with 10.2 points. Her 225 defensive rebounds set a team record.
Those numbers topped the ones she had her first year with the Razorbacks, when she was named to the All-SEC Freshman Team.
Poffenbarger was recently named to the Cheryl Miller Award Watch List, an honor given to the nation’s top small forward. She was honored to be included and fully embraces that spot in the lineup.
“Just being at that versatile position gives me so much room to do many things,” she said. “I think that’s what makes me most excited about being at Maryland, the system that they play, allowing my versatility to kind of come to life. I’m excited to continue to rebound and shoot some 3s.”
Poffenbarger is one of seven players Maryland got from the transfer portal during the offseason. It’s fair to wonder how all the newcomers, who hail from different programs, might mesh, even in this age of here today, gone next season college athletics.
The team’s Croatia Tour in June, when the Terps had 10 practices and two games, undoubtedly helped the Terps bond. And in the second game, a 93-92 win over All-Star Split, Poffenbarger had 14 points and 13 rebounds after getting banged up earlier.
“She ended up taking six stitches and came back and played the very next game,” Frese said. “She’s just continued to show her toughness over and over. We’ve been able to practice over the summer and into the fall, so she’s been able to put herself in position to really showcase what she can do.”
Such toughness helped her thrive in the Southeastern Conference and should do the same in the Big Ten, which has added former Pac-12 teams USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon.
Poffenbarger expects the league to be challenging. But since joining the Terps, she’s continued to soak up knowledge to brace for nightly battles.
“We worked a lot on moving without the ball,” she said. “Being a shooter, you have to be able to do many things because they’ll push you off the line. I think my biggest progress over the past six months has been consistency and getting into the lane, driving and shooting behind ball screens.”
And doing all those things close to home is all-the-sweeter.
“Everything has been really good,” she said. “I’ve been loving everything so far.”
