December 12, 2025
How Maryland and Brenda Frese handled Kaylene Smikle injury, overtime and adversity to beat Minnesota
Maryland was down nine points with a minute left in double overtime, without star guard Kaylene Smikle and won 100-99
On Dec. 7, the unranked Minnesota Golden Gophers had the No. 7 Maryland Terrapins on the ropes. With one minute remaining in the second overtime, Minnesota held a 99-90 lead over Maryland.
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One look at the women’s basketball social media-sphere revealed a chunk of Big Ten fans all took the same action — they shut off their TVs and streaming devices, confident Minnesota would win. It is hard to blame them, too. ESPN analytics gave just Maryland a .01% chance of victory at that point.
Maryland head coach Brenda Frese’s Terrapins brought Harrison Ford’s famous Han Solo role to life when they became the epitome of “never tell me the odds.”
A minute of game time later, and Maryland had defended its undefeated record, beating Minnesota 100-99.
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For many programs, it’d be a foundational victory, a win that a team hangs its hat on and revisits for years to come. For Frese and the Terrapins, it was a routine Sunday.
“I’ve been to three Final Fours. I’ve been in an overtime game for a national championship, plenty of overtimes myself,” Frese told The IX Basketball. “So it just means I’m getting a lot older.”
Frese does not get too caught up in the details outside of her team, how they are playing and what is going on in the game. The 2006 national championship-winning coach often does not remember the wins, mostly just the losses. At the end of a season, Frese can not tell you how many victories the Terrapins accumulated. It is not how the two-time AP Coach of the Year operates.
“I’m just so caught up in just the next day, the next practice, the next game, what those look like, and then what we can learn from them, out of winning and losing,” Frese said.
After the game, Frese told reporters in Minnesota that during the final overtime, she had to ask the bench if they were in the second or third extra period. Frese’s focus was on the current possession, the score and what her team needed to get done to win.
What made Sunday’s game different than any other overtime thriller is the fact that Maryland played with such a depleted roster.
The Terrapins already had starters out with season-ending injuries, a third role player out off the bench, plus a game-altering guard still recovering from an ACL tear sustained last season. Of those two absent starters, one was a new revelation to basketball fans.
Maryland announced hours before the game that Smikle, a two-time All-Big Ten guard and arguably the Terrapins’ best player, elected to have knee surgery and would not play another game in the 2025-26 campaign. In Smikle’s first season after an in-conference transfer from Rutgers in the spring of 2024, she led the Terrapins with 17.9 points per game.
“Ever since KK [Smikle] has been here, she’s never gone through a preseason with us. So, even when she came from Rutgers, her first year, she was battling injuries. Now going into this, it’s been something that she’s had to be extremely tough-minded,” Frese said.
Frese, Smikle and team doctors thought that they had a plan to allow Smikle to play through the injury this season with rest and rotation. It was not a situation where Maryland asked Smikle to play through it; Smikle did so because she had played injured for most of her college career.
“She’s used to that,” Frese said. “Once she continued to give feedback that it wasn’t getting better, and the pain she was playing in and wanting to shut herself down to have the surgery, it just made sense.”
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Smikle joined fellow guards Lea Bartelme and Ava McKennie on the season-ending injury list. The former, a freshman from Slovenia who already earned the trust of Frese to start the first four games, and the latter, a sophomore off the bench who received more minutes for the Terps in year two.
Without Smikle especially, the Terrapins leaned on freshmen, transfers and a returning leader, and the group did things that even Frese was not expecting.
Up first was Saylor Poffenbarger. The senior, who transferred before the 2024-25 season from Arkansas, made it to the free-throw line following a key offensive rebound from Duke transfer guard Oluchi Okanawa. Poffenbarger tried to put the follow-up basket away but was fouled and made both shots from the free-throw line.
“A year ago, as she [Poffenbarger] transitioned in here, her leadership has been the unsung hero behind the scenes, sending text messages, taking kids to dinner, phone calls,” Frese said.
The Terrapins coach swapped out Poffenbarger for freshman guard Kyndal Walker. The first year Terp played only 32 seconds of the game’s 50 minutes and created momentum that Maryland rode all the way to the victory. On the inbound pass, Maryland’s full-court press double team forced a pass that Walker picked up from nearly half the court away.
“Kyndal Walker sitting on the bench and comes in for one of the most impactful minutes of the game, and she was back at half court and read the trap and made the play,” Frese said. “That wasn’t anything from me; that was them just making play after play within that game to want to win and compete.”
Within four game seconds, Okanawa intercepted another pass as Minnesota tried all it could to get out of its own backcourt to attempt to break the press. Making up part of the double team was transfer guard Yarden Garzon from Indiana. Okanawa hit the layup for 25 points on the day, the junior’s single-game high.
Okanawa and Garzon came from winning programs and already established themselves as elite talents within the ACC and Big Ten, respectively. Before the season even began, Frese and the coaching staff challenged the duo.
“A lot of times, players come in and do more, like observing and waiting to see. Where we’ve really challenged the two of them to step into much bigger roles, not only from a basketball end,” Frese said. “But just from a leadership end, and I just can’t say enough about those two, coaching them and where they’ve been on display.”
Garzon was the only player for either team to play all 50 minutes of the Terrapins’ victory. While Garzon’s 38.5% shooting was under her season and career highs of 41.4% and 44%, the guard led Maryland with nine assists, including the most important one.
With 12.1 seconds remaining in double overtime, Garzon lobbed a pass between two Golden Gophers and into the streaking hands of Poffenbarger on the inbound pass. Back in the game for Walker, Poffenbarger hit the layup to give Maryland its first, and only, lead of the final period of overtime. The basket gave Poffenbarger a career high 30 points.
After the exhausting effort the Terps put into their first Big Ten game of the season, the team hopped on a late flight out of Minneapolis and headed home. In three days, Maryland had another game, this time at home against Delaware State from the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference.
Of all games to take a breather during the nonconference schedule, a 3-7 midmajor side a few nights after a game that felt more like an epic than a basketball game would be a good pick. On top of that, both Poffenbarger and freshman guard Addi Mack, who played 48 minutes against her hometown Golden Gophers on Sunday, had a planned rest game before an eight-day break from competitive basketball.
Maryland won 91-21 with only nine available players. The only returning starters from Sunday, Garzon and Okanawa, continued to lead the Terps with 18 points apiece. Vacation did not start early in College Park.
“There’s a letdown, right, emotionally, physically, as well as the team that you’re getting ready to play,” Frese said. “The fact that they went out and played probably one of their most complete minutes. 40-minute game, broke a school record, held them to 21 points, and they just played the right way for 40 minutes.”
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Sunday night and through the week, coaches texted Frese. The small group of other people who understand the work Frese and her staff put into the Terrapins reached out via texts and calls to talk about the nine-point comeback. Harvard women’s basketball head coach Carrie Moore made the final two minutes of the game required viewing for her team following practice.
In a short period of time, that Maryland victory became the example of overcoming adversity. No star scorer? No problem. Substitute in a freshman in the second overtime who had yet to see the court in the previous 45 minutes when your team is down seven points? Sure, why not?
Frese and the Terrapins defied logic in their 100-99 Sunday victory to start Big Ten play. Now, there are 17 other in-conference games to challenge Maryland, but that first win fostered belief in the decimated Terps roster. Soon, Frese gets guard Bri McDaniel back, a conduit of basketball energy to any game she enters. All the while, the new-look roster has time to grow.
The rest of the season will not be an easy road, but thanks to an early-season challenge, it’s not an unfamiliar route.
“They want to be great. It’s really fun,” Frese said. “If we wanted to be on the court all day with them, they would be there, that’s where they want to be. And as coaches, gosh, what a dream to be day to day with your team of players that want to be there.”
Jenn Hatfield contributed reporting to this story.
