GREENVILLE, North Carolina — When the University of Maryland Eastern Shore women's basketball squad opens up the season today (Nov. 6) at East Carolina University — a team they faced just a season ago — the Hawks will have no advantage of prior knowledge.

"We don't really know a whole lot about them," head coach Fred Batchelor said. "We are really going into this game probably more blind than any first game of the season. They have a new coach. We don't know what they run or what they don't run. They haven't had anything but a scrimmage and it was closed, so we can't get any information on that."

So what the Hawks will be focused on is what they can control — themselves.

Eastern Shore enters this season with the benefit of a backcourt that Batchelor said he would put up against any in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference.

The senior duo of Ciani Byrom and Keyera Eaton — who both hail from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, are both healthy at the start of the season and looking to complete a season together for the first time in their careers previously marred by injury.

"We are just excited to have both of them," Batchelor said. "It has been a tough challenge for them for three years. Freshman year in backcourt when they took over starting, we won our last six games. Then Eaton broke her thumb in the last two minutes of the last game of the regular season.

The following year, the team was off to the best start in school history and then Byrom suffered a knee injury in the opening came of MEAC conference play at North Carolina A&T State.

"Last year we started with both of them not on the floor for the first month of the season," Batchelor said. "It took a while to adjust to that when we did not have any preseason and come together."

Batchelor will also lean heavily on the experience of senior guard Ra'Jean Martin (Jacksonville, Florida) who will help provide stability in the backcourt against a challenging early season schedule and in the MEAC.

"Those three kids in that senior class that I have been fortunate enough to coach for four years — I know they are going to do something special this year," Batchelor said. "I'm excited to watch and be a part of it."

The one thing Batchelor does know about the Pirates is that they returned a lot of players from last year's team — especially on the inside.

"They really hurt us on the  glass last year," Batchelor said. "They had 23 offensive rebounds and outrebounded us by 13 or 14. That has been our focus, to be able to rebound the basketball, and that is keeping them off the glass. We have to do a better job of blocking out and this will be a really big challenge for us."

That will mean that the Hawks must compete on the boards as a team and not rely on an outsized front line to do all the work.

"I think if we can hold our own on the glass, we'll give ourselves a good chance to compete," Batchelor said.