No. 11 Maryland women’s basketball will be back in action on Sunday to host Saint Francis.

The Terps have enjoyed a week off after a dominating win over Towson last Sunday, 98-63, and will look for their first 6-0 start since the 2021-22 season.

“It’s been a week of practices for us to improve and get better,” head coach Brenda Frese said. “Able to really work on some things defensively and fine tuning things on the offensive end to get ourselves ready for Saint Francis.”

Sunday’s matchup will tip-off at 1 p.m. from Xfinity Center and stream on Big Ten Plus.

Saint Francis Red Flash (1-5, 0-0 Northeast Conference)

2023-24 record: 5-25, 4-12 NEC

Head coach Keila Whittington is in her sixth season with the Red Flash and has only led her team to a winning record once. Saint Francis has an overall 46-102 record under Whittington.

Saint Francis earned its first win of the season on Wednesday night, when the Red Flash took down Robert Morris, 58-55, on the road. Saint Francis has suffered defeats to NJIT, Lafayette, Coppin State, Canisius and Loyola Maryland.

Players to watch

Yanessa Boyd, sophomore guard, 5-foot-9, No. 0 — Boyd is in her second season with the Red Flash and has solidified herself as a starter, leading the team in minutes. She also leads the team with 7.7 points per game. after finishing third last season with 7.1 points per game. Boyd is from Frederick, Maryland, and finished her high school career at Riverdale Baptist.

Ineivi Plata, freshman guard, 5-foot-3, No. 10 — Plata has started every game and is second on the team in minutes as freshman out of White Plains, New York. Plata is currently averaging 4.2 points, 4.0 rebounds, 2.3 assists and 2.6 turnovers per game. She is 9-of-29 from the field and 2-of-16 from 3-point range this season. She scored a career-high nine points against Coppin State.

Natalie Johnson, junior guard, 5-foot-8, No. 5 — Johnson is in her first season with Saint Francis after transferring from Robert Morris, who Johnson had 10 points against on Wednesday. She has only started one game this season, but averages 7.5 points per game, the second most for Saint Francis. Johnson averages 19.8 minutes per game and is a solid piece off the bench for the Red Flash.

Strength

Rebounding. The Red Flash have outrebounded their opponents this season, 194-188. As a team, Saint Francis averages 32.3 rebounds per game, which ranks fifth in the NEC, and is led by Marina Artero and Plata, who both average 4.0 rebounds.

Weakness

Turnovers. Saint Francis turns the ball over 21.7 times per game, leading to a -7.8 turnover margin for the Red Flash. Opponents average 19.7 points off turnovers and the Red Flash’s assist-to-turnover ratio is 0.5.

Three things to watch

1. A differential against Coppin State. The Red Flash fell to Coppin State, 74-38, on Nov. 12, while Maryland previously took down Coppin State on Nov. 7, 70-47. That is a 59-point margin between Maryland’s and Saint Francis’ performances against Coppin State. While anything can happen, the Terps should have no issues beating Saint Francis.

2. An easy stretch. After the Terps defeated then-No. 11 Duke and Syracuse, they have entered a three-week stretch against lower-level competition until its first Big Ten game on Dec. 7 against Purdue. Their final nonconference game of the regular season will be in the midst of Maryland’s conference schedule against No. 4 Texas in the Coretta Scott King Classic. The Terps will need to be conscious of keeping their foot on the pedal over the next two weeks before their schedule gets tough.

3. Keeping pace. The Terps have three players averaging double-digit points in Kaylene Smikle, Shyanne Sellers and Christina Dalce, as well as two players who are averaging upward of seven rebounds per game in Dalce and Saylor Poffenbarger. Scoring and rebounding have been key parts of Maryland’s game thus far, and the Terps are in position to improve these averages Sunday.

“We just want to take where we’re at and continue to keep building and improving and getting better,” Frese said.

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While rummaging through the Maryland Center for History and Culture in Baltimore, Mario Harley, a citizen and historian of the Piscataway tribe, found peace coins given out by British colonists settling in the state. These were pieces of history that had been forgotten — one coin dating back to 1652.

They were given to tribal leaders as symbols of peace treaties, typically agreements about land and trade. Over time, though, they would repeatedly be broken if the tribes had any actual claim to the land involved.

This week, engineering students at the University of Maryland have been using a 3D printer to recreate those coins. The process takes 10-12 hours inside the printer, and a few more hours to put on finishing touches.

“We have a powder-based 3D metal printer,” said Rick Blanton, the director of technical operations for the Clark School of Engineering at the university. “What this is able to do is take layers of powdered metal and then use a laser to heat that powder up until it melts together in a sintering process.”

It’s repeated hundreds to thousands of times, based on a 3D scan done by an Owings Mills-based company called Direct Dimensions. The technology that private company used can read details and narrow down precision to 50 micron.

To put that in context, a human hair has a diameter of 75 micron. The technology is so precise, it’s able to capture the imprecision that comes with handmade coins from centuries ago.

“One of the nice things about the technology is that you’re able to catch some of the original surface textures that were part of the original coins,” Blanton said.

From what Harley has seen so far, the level of detail found in the new coins is even greater than what was washed away by centuries of time.

“Especially the portrait of Anne Arundel, which is on the reverse side of the 1652 Calvert medal,” Harley said. “The details in her hair and the in the air, clothing, her facial expressions, was greater than what it was on the historic metal.”

The three coins being reproduced are the Calver Peace Medal, which was given to the Susquehannock tribe in 1652 in exchange for rights to Piscataway lands along the Chesapeake Bay — a deal that would be sort of like if New Jersey just decided to sell the state of Delaware to Maryland.

“This was the first peace medal given to indigenous America by the British,” Harley said.

Another medal was given to the Piscataway by the Calverts in 1676 as a token of good faith. The last one has six arrows, which has historians thinking it was made in the 1740s and represented the Iroquois Confederacy of Six Nations.

The three medals are being recreated to be bigger than the originals, so living members of the tribes can receive them and carry them.

The work is being done by engineering students such as Robert Alban. For him, it’s about learning skills that will help him when he graduates.

“It poses an interesting challenge to me as an operator and as a manager of this machine, of ‘How do you make that work?’ Because there are a lot of companies, like Lockheed Martin, a lot of other aerospace contractors that use these same machines,” Alban said. “They just rip parts from them and use them in whatever build they’re doing at the time. So it’s really fun to get challenging pieces like this that I know will definitely help me in my future.”

Blanton said the real world impact of this classroom learning comes with higher stakes than a typical classroom project, with a higher level of expectation and stricter definition of success.

“It allows for the living members of the tribe today to have representative artifacts that are absolutely critical to their culture,” he said. “Having that history available for them to, you know, see, touch and feel is a critical component to making that connection with their past.”

Harley is hoping to get the recreated coins next week.

“I can only imagine putting myself in the place of my ancestors,” he said. “When they’re coming back with these medals in their hand, they’re feeling quite proud that they maybe, maybe have established a relationship that could be long lasting, that allowed them to continue to live the lifestyle the creator intended them to live. And then realizing over time that that wasn’t the case.”

He was extremely thankful to the university, as well as Direct Dimension, for collaborating to make this possible.

“Having something on display in the museum is good, but having the people in the community, in the DMV region be aware of it, is even better,” he said. “Having a capability at College Park to reproduce items is good. Having something of a historical nature that we can share with the students on campus as well as around the region, is better.”

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