Anonymously, all 14 McNeese State Cowgirls wrote a topic on a piece of paper. The scraps were placed into a hat and placed into the center of a room in Abilene, Texas.
This team meeting was Mercedes Rogers’ original idea but multiple other players agreed it needed to happen. One day earlier, McNeese was fragmented and unfocused in an ugly 71-59 loss to the University of New Orleans on the Burton Coliseum floor. A matchup with perennial Southland Conference power Abilene Christian loomed following a sometimes interminable, 10-hour bus ride the team split between two days.
“It was nice for us all to say stuff that needed to be said and get on the same page,” senior guard Amber Donnes said. “We’re all usually really focused but it was nice to get it all out and talk and get our feelings and emotions out there.”
Some of the meeting, Donnes said, had little to do with basketball. Other conversations were directed solely at the program’s three seniors — Donnes, Victoria Rachal and Hannah Cupit — who have been shuffled in and out of the lineup all season.
“Just the fact that the freshmen and everyone really does look up to us and they do want us to score, be vocal and talk and they do still look up to us and all that,” Donnes said. “I thought it was really cool. I felt we all needed to hear that.”
Scoreboard aside — the Cowgirls lost, 77-65, to Abilene Christian the next day with a 3-for-22 display from the 3-point line — Donnes felt the team meeting strengthened a young bunch.
Effort and energy, things sorely lacking during and questioned in the aftermath of the loss to the Privateers was present. The Cowgirls won the offensive glass, 14-12, had 11 steals and only turned the basketball over 12 times.
“That was probably the most impactful of my whole career,” Donnes, a senior, said of the meeting. “I thought it was really good.”
Still, shooting ails the Cowgirls, who are earning the reputation of a streaky team that alternates weeks of efficient offense with those marred by subpar shooting. First-year coach Kacie Cryer will re-insert Donnes into the starting lineup Tuesday night in place of Dede Sheppard against Central Arkansas in the Lake Charles Civic Center.
“I was kind of hoping by this point we would have that one scorer that when we needed to make a shot or make something happen on the offensive end we’d have that,” Cryer said. “At glimpses you see different people emerge but we still haven’t had that one person just take over a game … That’s a lack of experience in different ways. When you have a team of scorers, it’s a good thing but it can hurt you at times because you don’t have that one person who can take that shot.”
Sheppard, who went 1-for-8 from the field in the Cowgirls’ 67-52 loss to the Sugar Bears on Jan. 18, is the team’s third-leading scorer in Southland play. She carved a niche earlier this season in the very role to which she’s being assigned — coming off the bench and bringing a new energy to the floor while scoring in bunches.
Donnes, too, struggled against the Sugar Bears, playing just 17 minutes and taking one shot. Only one Cowgirl — Rogers — made more than three field goals that night. The team shot 31 percent, a number it will attempt to rectify in the new setting Burton Coliseum’s rodeo and livestock show has placed it in.
“These kids played really well at Abilene on the defensive end and rebounding, even though we got out-rebounded,” Cryer said. “When it was all said and done, if you look at the stats we won in a lot of categories, but where we didn’t win was our shooting percentage. They made big shots and we didn’t and that’s going to be something that we have to be ready to do tomorrow.”
from American Press: Your Best News And Advertising Source - Home http://ift.tt/2jPoVow
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment