Updates

I realized this week that I haven’t done a very good job of updating this blog – so I am going to try and play catch up. So far it has been filled with a season of some highs and lows but still I am overall very happy with the girls.

We started off with two games in southern California playing San Bernardino and UC San Diego – two teams who made the national tournament last year. We didn’t play very well against Bernardino and ended up losing 62-57. I felt that was a game we could have very easily won, but didn’t play up to our potential. Then we traveled to San Diego a team that starts five girls above 6’0. They also played in the national tournament last year. We battled with them the entire game, got down in the second half by 13 – but came back to tie it. We ran out of gas and came up short and had to foul in the end. Final score was 71-61. I feel this team will be a top team in our region and felt like we were right there – so I took some positives from the weekend even though we went 0-2.

The next weekend we were again on the road at Chico State! We played the host school first and they hadn’t lost a game in 24 home game win streak, which was huge. Chico made the national tournament last year as well and were picked this year to win the CCAA. I was so proud of our girls as we played well. It was a bitter sweet victory though because we lost, Jessica Carver to a season ending knee injury. That is the fourth player from last year’s starting squad that is missing from this team - talk about adversity! Saturday we played Sonoma State – another team that made the national tournament last year. It was a back and forth game, but we just didn’t have enough gas and lost 70-63. This puts us at 1-3.

This past weekend we got to go back to the Midwest. Two of our seniors and Coach Larson are from Iowa (Lindsey Chettinger and Courtney Boyd) along with myself being from South Dakota. We spent Thanksgiving at the Chettinger’s and ate more food than you can possibly imagine! We pretty much ate Iowa right off the map! Saturday we played University of South Dakota – who was National Champion Runner’s up last year at NCAA DII. This year they made the jump to Division I. With four minutes to play in the game we were all tied up – then we only score one point in the final minutes. We had good looks they just didn’t fall and lost 80-62.

Monday we traveled to College of Saint Mary, which is the college that I coached at before coming to Dixie State. We won that game by a score of 100-67. It was a great game for some of our younger girls to get some minutes.

That puts us at 2-4 but we have had a pretty challenging schedule up to this point. We FINALLY have home games this weekend when we host our tournament.

We have had some bad luck with injuries but that is a part of the game. We just have to try different things to get the job done and they are responding well. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and we appreciate your support!