Another game, another loss.
For the UW women’s basketball team, the questions are piling up, the doubt is creeping in, and the confidence has been all but shattered.
In the interview room after Thursday night’s 76-64 loss to Iowa in the Kohl Center, the team’s sixth loss in a row, the players tried to stay upbeat, but the sullen looks on their faces showed they were hurting inside–with good reason.
After a 15-game winning streak in what seems almost several seasons ago, questions were easier to answer, and there weren’t a lot of them. But now, falling out of contention for the Big Ten title in what has been a miserable slide, there can’t be enough questions. Has it been turnovers, poor rebounding, poor shooting, lack of emotion, lack of hustle, or what? In other words, what happened?
“I wish I could give you an answer for that,” head coach Jane Albright said. “I don’t know. I’ve watched more film, and I’m probably going to watch film again to try to figure that out about our offensive system. I don’t know, [the media] all get to be the critics on that.”
Thursday night, the overriding factor was Iowa’s scorching shooting to the tune of 60.4 percent. However, it was Wisconsin’s porous defense at times that allowed the Hawkeyes to make easy layups on entry passes and backdoor cuts. Furthermore, the Badgers were not able to hit shots down the stretch, going one of seven in field goal attempts as Iowa pulled away.
A more overarching factor, one that could serve as a theme for the entire losing streak, is simply that UW has not been able to get the breaks it had in its winning streak. Now it seems that everything is turning against them and close games are impossible to win.
“We did have some pretty good little breaks, I remember, close games down the stretch that went our way,” Albright said. “I think we just have to continue to think we can turn it around, and those close games will come back to us.”
However, good teams make their breaks, as the old cliche goes, and maybe the Badgers simply aren’t as good as their winning streak suggested.
So with four games to go, the Badgers, who have fallen to 16-7 (7-6 Big Ten), must do everything possible to right their sinking season and start playing well again by the time the postseason starts. And the Badgers know as well as anyone that the Big Ten and NCAA Tournaments can erase anything that has happened in the regular season, good or bad.
Currently, however, senior guard Tamara Moore has perhaps best summed up the feelings and efforts of the team.
“Losing is not fun,” she said. “People might think that we’re not trying our hardest, but we’re trying to win. I’m the type of person that hates to lose. If you could just see us in the locker room, how we look, it’s just not fun to lose. Especially our sixth in a row.”
It seems the only applicable word for the team’s current situation is frustration.