At a school where men’s basketball is the end-all and be-all in popularity and relevance, it’s easy to overlook the fact that IU does, indeed, have other teams.
And in this time of the year when college football and the NFL kick off, they take the metaphorical lunch money from every other sport that tries to stay relevant in late summer and early fall, both college and professional.
But this doesn’t mean there aren’t exciting things happening outside of those two sports. You just have to look further than page one on ESPN.com.
Enter Teri Moren.
On Aug. 9, IU women’s basketball added the former Indiana State head coach to the staff after her first 20-win season in Terre Haute.
It was enough to get her team to the Women’s National Invitation Tournament, the NCAA’s sort of consolation tournament for teams that weren’t quite good enough for the NCAA tournament during the regular season.
Meanwhile in Bloomington, after the IU women’s basketball team started 14-0 and suffered a Pacers-esque mid-season collapse that eventually forced them into the WNIT last year, then-Coach Curt Miller unexpectedly resigned and left Athletic Director Fred Glass with a tough decision to make.
The team had been played poor to mediocre the last five years, only achieving a 0.500 record once in that time period, and a change was needed.
As it turns out, the decision to hire Moren wasn’t too tough because she knows Indiana basketball like Dwight Schrute knows beets.
She grew up playing basketball in Seymour, Ind., and eventually went on to play at Purdue. Afterward, she went from an assistant coach at Butler, head coach at the University of Indianapolis, assistant coach at Georgia Tech to the head-coaching job at ISU.
The Sycamores improved each year Moren coached them, and after Miller left IU, the Hoosiers needed somebody with potential and a winning record to coach a young team with a strong class of new recruits.
It won’t be easy, though.
The Big Ten is a totally different animal than the Missouri Valley Conference. The talent will be much better and the schedule will be much tougher than it was in Terre Haute.
Also, there won’t be as much leeway. Although the Hoosiers don’t exactly have a track record of dominance in women’s basketball like the University of Connecticut or the University of Tennessee do, the expectations will be higher here than they ever were for Moren.
But if Moren can build on the potential of this year’s team, she could finally put women’s basketball on the map here in Bloomington.
She has the luxury of starting with a clean slate, and while the team will never generate as much hype and fanaticism as the men’s basketball team does on a year-to-year basis, Moren could turn the team into something worth watching.
It would be a huge refresher for a team that struggles to get any media attention. As of now, Wikipedia says the team is still looking for a head coach, and IU women’s basketball has the shortest entry of any team on the page.
Again, it won’t be easy, but the potential is there.
And if Moren can deliver like so many believe she can, the whole school stands to benefit.
