BLOOMINGTON — After IU women’s basketball’s season-opener against Brown on Monday, head coach Teri Moren expressed frustration with her team’s lack of discipline.
There were issues on both ends of the floor, but one aspect Moren wasn’t pleased with was IU’s 18 turnovers. Moren ended her postgame press conference by warning that if her team didn’t tune things up offensively, opponents would take advantage.
Unfortunately for the Hoosiers, that rude awakening came much quicker than expected. Indiana suffered its first loss of the season on Thursday, a 72-68 overtime defeat to Harvard at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall.
From the opening tip, Harvard came out in a full-court press that gave the Hoosiers fits. By the end of the first quarter, IU racked up 11 turnovers and trailed 21-7. Indiana’s struggle to beat Harvard’s press would persist to the final buzzer, and the team finished with 27 total turnovers. Every Hoosier who played on Thursday committed at least one miscue.
“We’ve seen a lot of different presses in the Big Ten,” Moren said after the game. “We probably started working on our press attack far earlier than we ever have, because we have always felt like that’s been an Achilles Heel for us. Some of those we just threw it right to them. There’s a lot of them to sift through on film, but it’s disappointing we didn’t handle that piece of it better because it wasn’t a surprise.”
A performance like this came as a shock to many, especially the fans in Assembly Hall. With every turnover came a louder groan, a distraught face palm, or a frustrated “come on!”
Moren was as animated as anyone in the building, with visible frustration increasing with every turnover.
She felt her team was prepared for the press heading into the game, which only added to her disappointment in this performance.
“We’ve worked on it, we talked about it, we knew they were going to press,” Moren said. There were moments when we panicked, there were moments when they sped us up. And so those are all things that are hard lessons, but they’re lessons that we have to learn.”
For Moren, those “hard lessons” have to be especially difficult to experience, considering the early preparation to try and mitigate them. Moren even commented on how well she thought her team had prepared heading into Thursday’s game. In a time like this where lessons are learned, you have to rely on your veteran players.
Veterans like Chloe Moore-McNeil, Sydney Parrish, and Yarden Garzon are expected to take a major jump in both leadership and production this year.
However, a major concern that is apparent throughout the first two games is the lack of a No. 1 option for breaking the press.
“It is perplexing to me, how we are a veteran team and how we can have those moments,” Moren said. “We had them against Brown…those are uncharacteristic of us. And I get it, that’s not what we normally look like.”
With this team specifically, it seems that no one has really taken a step forward to be “the leader”. If you take a look at past teams, it was more obvious. However, based on both production and handling pressure situations so far, IU doesn’t have that clear option yet.
That’s not to say players aren’t attempting to step up and try to place themselves in a leading role, however.
“It’s really hard because I came out with the intentions to be a better leader and be a better point guard,” Moore-McNeil said postgame. “Obviously with the result and the 27, I’ll go ahead and call it 30 turnovers, I’m very disappointed not only in my team but in myself as that leader.”
Indiana has to find a player who is willing to step up and take control of the pacing on offense. With two performances where turnover numbers were a problem, the Hoosiers need to find a method of breaking full-court presses more efficiently.
Instead of forcing a player into that role, though, Moren thinks it will come more naturally. Rather than reflecting on the years where they did have a clear No. 1 option, Moren has made the point of saying that this is a different team compared to the more dominant and disciplined versions of years past. And now, as the Hoosiers look forward, Moren hopes an answer arrives soon.
“This is not the team it was a year ago, Moren said. “We have a lot of room to improve and grow, and we will. This is a team full of competitors and it may take us a minute. I hope it’s just a couple of games to figure things out.”
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