BLACKSBURG—Britney Anderson waited too long to pick herself up.

Anderson, Virginia Tech’s dependable senior forward, recovered from a slow start to score 15 of her team-high 21 points in Thursday night’s 79-76 homecourt loss to the University of Virginia. But she said she could have, and should have, done more.

“I’ll take the blame” for a first half in which the Hokies went more than nine minutes without a field goal, said Anderson, a former standout player at Meadowbrook High School in Richmond. “Whenever someone else isn’t playing well, I try to pick them up and get them back on track. If I can do it for someone else, you’d think I could do it for myself. But I couldn’t. That first half was…“

She paused to search for the proper description. “...a nightmare.“

Anderson, the state Group AAA Player of the Year in 2001, scored six first-half points on 2-of-3 shooting. She was far more active thereafter. She made 7 of 12 second-half shots, in the process helping her team erase all but two points of a double-digit deficit. During one juncture she dominated the game in a manner that awakened memories of her commanding play at Meadowbrook. She scored on three consecutive Tech possessions. The last of those possessions produced a 3-pointer from the top of the free-throw circle.

Said Virginia coach Debbie Ryan: “Once she got going, she was very hard to We tried everyone on her. We tried post players. We tried guards. We tried everyone.“

Anderson, 6-0, said she “felt I owed it to my team to try to pick things up in the second half. One of her coaches, she said, advised her at intermission “to just let the first half go. So that’s what I decided to do. I played so bad in the first half. I just made up my mind that, ‘You know what? If I’m going to go out tonight, at least I’m going to go out fighting and shooting.‘“

Anderson has scored nearly as many points this season (301) as in her previous three seasons combined (312).