IU Coach Teri Moren re-watched the fourth quarter of her team’s collapse at Auburn on Sunday on the plane ride home from the game. When she got back home late that night, she watched it again.
Within 48 hours of the IU women’s basketball team walking off the court at Auburn, Moren said she’d examined the final quarter five or six times, including once with her players. Moren said by that point, she pretty much knew how each play in the 10-minute period unfolded.
“Coaches tend not to sleep after games like that,” Moren said. “But I wanted the kids to see it too. I wanted them to understand the magnitude of what unraveled and what happened, and I think they learned from it. We’re going to get better because of it.”
Despite holding a 17-point lead early in the fourth, the Hoosiers suffered a four-point loss to the Tigers and fell to 4-2 on the year. IU won’t get a chance to come back home and lick its wounds with an easy game or two, though, as the Hoosiers will head back out on the road to play North Carolina State on Thursday.
NC State is 5-2 this season, having most recently lost two of three games at the Paradise Jam in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In Thursday’s game, which is part of the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, the Wolfpack will return home, where they are undefeated this year.
As a veteran team with four senior starters, the Wolfpack present a similar challenge to what IU faced with Auburn. Both Moren and her players said they were looking forward to going right back out on the road to correct the mistakes they made at Auburn. If IU holds a late lead against NC State, don’t expect the Hoosiers to take their foot off the gas.
“They’re going to pose some problems for us defensively if we don’t get our rotations fixed and we’re not more sound than we were down the stretch at Auburn,” Moren said. “Our veterans have to look at themselves and see what they can do better when we get in situations like that.”
Moren cited NC State’s versatile senior forward Jennifer Mathurin as someone the Hoosiers will have to watch. She can play down low and is second on the team in rebounding, but she can also step out to shoot the three. Mathurin is the team’s leading scorer, with 11.8 points per game.
Junior forward Amanda Cahill, IU’s own stretch forward who can score from the inside and outside, said the Hoosiers have been working on effectively combating Mathurin and the Wolfpack’s other three-point shooters. NC State has made the ninth-most threes in the country, and nearly twice as many as IU has.
“They have some good bigs, so we’re preparing for it, and hopefully we’ll be ready to go,” Cahill said. “We’re working a lot on ball screens, being able to help our guards and support them, and then being able to get back, so hopefully that will show in the game.”
IU suffered through several blown games in the early part of last season that were similar to Sunday’s loss, and the Hoosiers were better at the end of the year because of it, Moren said.
With Thursday’s game against NC State, which tips off at 7 p.m. and airs on ACC Network Extra, IU gets an immediate opportunity to show growth. Moren thinks her team will be up and ready for the challenge.
“We have a great game plan,” Moren said. “And I would suspect that just because of the lingering feeling we have right now, that our kids are going to be excited and have a lot of energy and be ready to go.”
