Sports
Hammond Grad Returns Home to Face the Terps
Kelsie Hitesman is on the women's basketball team at Messiah College, which plays in College Park on Tuesday.
The University of Maryland women's basketball team will play its first exhibition game of the season on Tuesday in College Park and one of the visiting players will be very familiar to the area.
Kelsie Hitesman, a graduate of Hammond High School in Columbia, is a sophomore playing for Messiah College, a Division III program in Grantham, PA.
The Falcons will face Maryland, a Division I program in the Atlantic Coast Conference, at 7 p.m. at the Comcast Center.
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A 6-foot forward, Hitesman is from Jessup and played for Messiah last season, coming off the bench in nine games to average four minutes and 0.8 points per contest.
"She is a good, hard worker. She is a great kid," Messiah head coach Mike Miller told Columbia Patch on Monday. "She has a nice jump shot from 12 to 15 feet. She just needs to get stronger" as an inside player.
Find out what's happening in Columbiawith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Messiah was 19-8 overall last season. The Terps are ranked among the top 20 programs in the nation according to the Associated Press.
Miller said he was contacted about the exhibition game by Chris Campbell, the director of basketball operations for Maryland. Campbell graduated from Winston Churchill High in Potomac and was an assistant at Division III Marymount University in Arlington, VA from 2005-08 during a time he got to know Miller.
The first regular-season game for Maryland will be Nov. 11 against Loyola of Baltimore. The head coach for the Terps is Brenda Frese, who lives in the North Laurel section of Howard County.
