Women's basketball set for first scrimmage

As the IU women’s basketball team looks to make its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2002, it will take the all-important first step at 4 p.m. Saturday in Assembly Hall against Southern Indiana in the season-opening scrimmage.

The scrimmage will take place after the conclusion of the football game.

IU coach Felisha Legette-Jack said she is eager for her team to get on the court.

“It’s always exciting,” Legette-Jack said. “We really want to get on the court and play against somebody else for a change. This will kind of give us a gear-up a little bit, how we are going to sit, what we are going to say, who sits in the middle, where the coaches sit, all the kind of fun stuff.”

Players said they are also excited and ready to play someone other than themselves in order to see if some things they practiced will work.

“After a while, you know what the team is going to do, and you start thinking stuff isn’t going to work,” said sophomore guard Jori Davis. “So getting to play a different team, things are going to be more open and stuff like that, so it’s real exciting. It kind of feels like you’re in your room all day and you finally get to go out, so we finally get to go out and play another team.”

Legette-Jack admits she is unfamiliar with the Division II Screaming Eagles, who went 10-17 last year. However, she said not knowing your opponent doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

“I don’t know anything, but that’s cool, because we’ll get to think on the fly,” she said. “You think you know another team, and all of a sudden they change something up and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, that’s not in the scouting report.’ Sometimes the element of surprise might be helpful.”

One thing Legette-Jack wants to see from her team in Saturday’s scrimmage is tough play on the defensive side of the floor.

“We are looking for competition, and we are looking for our kids to compete,” she said. “We are looking for them to go hard defensively. We want them to put our staple on defense and on rebounding. If we can do those things, I think we can really grow our offense and put some points on the board, only if we can stop them on defense.”

For one Hoosier, this scrimmage comes at a good time. Last Sunday at Big Ten Media Day in Chicago, coaches and media members alike picked IU to finish in the bottom half of the conference, a position senior forward Amber Jackson isn’t too happy with.

“Our biggest focus is proving everyone wrong,” Jackson said. “We were picked to finish eighth in Big Ten by the fellow coaches of the Big Ten. As players and this whole program, we take that very personally, and we are offended by that. So right now our goal is to come up and show we are not an eighth-place team.”