COLLEGE PARK — Shyanne Sellers did her best to lead Maryland women’s basketball from the bench. She stood just as much as coach Brenda Frese did, pointing and screaming and clapping along with her teammates like she typically would. But her impact is limited from the sidelines.

Sellers, Maryland’s leading scorer and conductor of the Terps’ offense, suffered an injury in a 38-point loss to Texas on Monday. She’s been out since, missing this critical stretch of three games against top-25 opponents in seven days. This week should have been a gauge of what No. 8 Maryland’s ceiling and floor were ahead of the postseason, where it stood against the nation’s best.

“The reality is, when you lose your two top defenders and 32 points per game with Shy and Bri [McDaniel], we’ve been working to figure this out,” Frese said.

Instead, Maryland finished the stretch without two key contributors because of injury and is looking for fixes after three straight losses. A 82-67 defeat to No. 1 UCLA on Sunday is the Terps’ fourth loss in their last six games as their depth continues to be tested.

There’s no direct replacement for Sellers, and Sunday presented an even more difficult challenge: Lauren Betts, who finished Sunday with a career-high 33 points and had her way with a Maryland frontcourt in disarray.

Frese inserted 6-foot-6 forward Amari DeBerry into the starting lineup for the first time to counter UCLA’s 6-foot-7 center and leading scorer. But DeBerry, a UConn transfer who has played sparingly so far this season, did little to slow her counterpart. Betts, who led the team with 20.3 points and 10.1 rebounds per game entering Sunday, helped her team find a 20-15 lead early with 14 first-quarter points.

Maryland battled to keep its halftime deficit at five, closing the period on a 13-6 run to enter the break with hope and momentum. Betts still had her way with DeBerry and the Terps with 24 points on 11-for-12 shooting at the midway point.

Betts eclipsed 30 points in the third quarter as UCLA widened its lead to 17. Maryland trailed by as much as 25. Betts sat for most of the fourth quarter as the finishing touches were put on the Terps’ second-largest margin of defeat this season.

“We were trying to match height with Amari,” Frese said. “We were trying to double off the dribble, but then in the second half we just had to sell out and park somebody in there to get a second defender. We watched enough film. It’s a really hard scout. Teams that had the size to go against her impacted her a little bit. I thought [DeBerry] did a nice job.”

DeBerry finished with five points, three turnovers and two fouls. Betts added seven rebounds and four blocks to her career-best point total. UCLA guard Kiki Rice, a Bethesda native and Sidwell Friends graduate who drew loud applause when introduced pregame, tallied 19 points in front of a group of friends and family she said after the game was too large to count. Saylor Poffenbarger led Maryland with 18.

Top-ranked UCLA, now 20-0, has won every game by at least 10 in its first season in the Big Ten. The Bruins, the last remaining undefeated team in men’s or women’s college basketball, used the attention Betts warrants to shoot 55% from the floor to Maryland’s 41% rate.

As one squad surges, another searches.

“This was a really hard week,” Frese said. “Adversity hit. We can either run away from it, or we can run to it.”

A few spots down from Sellers on the bench sat McDaniel, who cheered just as loud as her injured teammate but did so from her chair and with a hefty knee brace. The Maryland guard and energy provider off the bench tore her ACL on Jan. 14 and will miss the remainder of the season.

Injuries are quickly depleting what was once a deep Terps rotation. Mir McClean (Roland Park Country) and DeBerry are seeing expanded roles but haven’t quite replaced what they lost in Sellers and McDaniel. And the timing couldn’t have been worse.

“With Shy and Bri going down, I’ve been in the gym way more,” said McClean, whose 12 points were a season high. “More than I was before, knowing I’d get more minutes.”

A staggering defeat to No. 7 Texas to start the week preceded another loss to No. 12 Ohio State on Wednesday. Sunday was Maryland’s fifth and final contest this month against a top-25 team.

The schedule softens from here. Just two currently ranked opponents remain for the Terps, and both of those games will be in College Park. February provides a much needed chance to get healthy and regroup before the postseason — a breather of sorts after a strenuous January.

“It’s really important to learn in January and not March,” Poffenbarger said. “We learned a lot about ourselves.”

Have a news tip? Contact Taylor Lyons at tlyons@baltsun.com, 410-332-6200 and x.com/TaylorJLyons.