Fighting Scots women’s hoops proved the league wrong this season. Predicted by coaches across the Midwest Conference to finish seventh, Monmouth turned heads with an 18-7 overall record which included a 13-5 record in league play. The Scots wrapped up the regular season last week with a second-place finish in conference. However, the Scots’ season is not over yet, and they cannot wait to start the conference tournament.
“We’re all excited, we’re all just ready to go. We’ve been practicing all week, so today could not get here soon enough” said sophomore guard Shayne Smith.
On making the conference tournament Carly Turnbull says, “It’s awesome. That was our goal all year long. We struggled a little bit in past years, but we always had that potential and now we’re kind of getting there and will be there for years to come.”
“It’s been more fun this year, you can see the progress” said Coach Wilson of the team’s improvement. “I think the last couple of years we’ve been figuring out who we are as individuals and who we are as a team and what we can be. I think this year we’ve spent more time learning how to win and that’s why I think we have the record we have because we’ve learned how to win. Going forward it’s how do we sustain that success not only this weekend but next year and the year after that. So, it feels really good to see all of our kids’ hard work come to fruition and put us in the spot we’re in.”
The season has not come without adversity as the Scots had lost three of their last four before the dramatic overtime winner against St. Norbert in the season finale. “You’re going to hit adversity at some time in the 30-games that you play in a season. We had a dream start so to speak. We were going to hit those blocks at some point and it’s kinda good that we hit those early because now we know how to rally back from it” said Turnbull.
On adversity, Coach Wilson added, “No season is a straight line on the positive. You have some ups and you have some downs. The way our kids have bounced back from that sort of stuff I’ve been really happy with. Hopefully we can take some of those lessons that we’ve learned and when things don’t go well for a couple possessions this weekend, we know it’s not the end of the world, we can bounce back, and we can still be good.”
While Monmouth split their two matches against Lake Forest in regular season play, their leader sounds confident that they can find victory. “We’re feeling really good. We got them here the first time and it was a great game and we could’ve done even better. Over there, we made a lot of mistakes, a lot of turnovers and they were hitting shots. So, they’re going to have to have a really great game and we’re going to have to have a crappy game for it to be a bad day for us. We’re ready to go and we think we can win for sure” said Turnbull.
As for prep, the Scots have been taking advantage of the extra-days to review sets and footage of their first-round opponent. “We went a lot more in depth with our scout, in terms of giving them all the sets that Lake Forest is going to run against us. We normally give them three or four, we’ve given them nine this week. We’ve had double the time to prep, so we’ve been able to put a lot more stuff in and focus on that. We feel that if we can go up and disrupt what they do offensively and really focus on the defensive end on Friday night then it’ll give us a chance to be successful” said Wilson.
Tate Heiple
Sports Editor