IU women’s basketball Coach Teri Moren could hardly hold herself up with less than two minutes remaining in the third quarter of Sunday’s matchup against No. 11 Maryland.
Slouched in the arms of assistant coach Janese Constantine, Moren looked on in disbelief after freshman guard Grace Berger was called for a travel.
“You can control a lot of things,” Moren said. “There are a lot of things you can’t control either, when I think about this game.”
But the travel wasn't quite the low point of Moren’s frustrations in IU’s 76-56 loss.
Midway through the third quarter, Moren reached her boiling point after disagreeing with a no-call as sophomore guard Bendu Yeaney drove to the basket.
After shouting at the referees, she was assessed her first technical foul of the season.
Moren was then held back by her assistants when she stepped out onto the court.
As a result, Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall reached its loudest point of the night with boos raining down from the stands. The boos quickly turned into a chant of “Teri! Teri! Teri!"
While it did bring a slight spurt of energy into the stadium, Moren said the technical foul was simply based off her getting a good look at the play and wanting to protect her players.
"Maryland has shown on film a propensity to foul,” Moren said. “They foul, and obviously we weren’t getting those calls today. That was what was frustrating, and you feel badly for your team because they’re playing to the game plan, and yet it didn’t seem like things were going the way that we had hoped they would or expected.”
IU came out with high energy in the first quarter for the second-consecutive game. However, the Hoosiers could not get themselves going in the final three frames.
Maryland controlled momentum with its ability to convert 25 fast-break points, made easy in part due to 20 IU turnovers.
“Giving the ball to them, them getting layups in transitions, just because we turned the ball over, we got ourselves with that,” sophomore guard Jaelynn Penn said. “That really was the game-changer."
Junior guard Kaila Charles led the way for the Terrapins, scoring 25 points Sunday, 21 of which came in the first half.
“She was getting a lot of wide-open layups because they were getting steals,” Yeaney said. “She’s gonna make her shots. She’s a great player, but I think we did a decent job on her in the half court. It was just our turnovers led to open layups for her.”
While Maryland’s leading scorer made plays, it was the opposite for IU’s top offensive threat.
Junior guard Ali Patberg came into the game averaging more points than Charles but has trended in the wrong direction of late.
After scoring a total of 10 points in her previous two games, Patberg came out flat against the Terrapins. She managed to score just three points, all of which came late in the fourth quarter with the game well out of reach.
“What we don’t do is give up on her,” Moren said. “I have to believe that some of it is mental, right now inside of her head. We’ve got to figure out how we can go back and show her clips of things when she was really good.”
With the loss, IU is now 16-5 on the season with a 5-4 record in the Big Ten.
The Hoosiers' next game is at 7 p.m. Thursday at No. 14 Rutgers.
