After opening exhibition play with a 78-49 win over Minnesota State-Mankato Nov. 7, the UW women’s basketball team will take on the Wisconsin AAU Select team Nov. 11 in the final exhibition game before the regular season.
After a disappointing 7-21 season last year, the Badgers will look for a turnaround year under new head coach Lisa Stone.
“This is where I’ve always wanted to be,” Stone said. “When you’re in a dream situation, you want to make it perfect. I love coming to work. I love what I do, and I hope I can take Wisconsin to where they want to go.”
Stone, a Wisconsin native, has a history of turning teams around. At UW-Eau Claire, she led a team that had recorded just one winning season in school history to 11 20-win seasons. In 12 years at UW-Eau Claire, Stone posted an impressive 277-59 record.
She currently ranks ninth among active Division I coaches in winning percentage (.761), with a 375-118 record in 18 seasons.
Looking to continue her success at Wisconsin, Stone has opened the year with a demanding practice schedule.
“Our practices have been long and intense and physical, and there has never been a complaint,” Stone said. “They want to win and they are going to do it together.”
Though official practices did not begin until Oct. 18, the team held intense workouts throughout the off-season.
“We were here in the weight room at 6 in the morning four days a week,” guard Stephanie Rich said. “No one ever missed for any reason. We worked hard, took care of our bodies, and we had fun. It was something that we needed to do, and it was important to us.”
After months of demanding workouts and inter-squad scrimmages, the Badgers are ready to get the season underway.
“We’re really excited,” forward Ebba Gebisa said. “As a team, we have been playing pick-up all spring, all summer, all fall. We’ve been banging up on each other for a long time now, and we’re ready to bang up on some other people and show everybody what we’re capable of this year.”
At 6-foot-7 and 6-foot-5, respectively, centers Lello Gebisa and Emily Ashbaugh will give the Badgers one of the tallest post combinations in the Big Ten.
“Our inside game is going to be critical for our team to succeed,” Ebba Gebisa said. “It’s going to be important for them to dominate and establish a presence inside. Then we can work on kicking it back out and hitting some outside shots to open it up for them so that they can do their thing in the middle.”
In naming Gebisa and Ashbaugh team captains, Stone has expressed confidence that the two centers can play together. When posed with a similar situation at UW-Eau Claire, Stone demonstrated her coaching flexibility in engineering a successful triple post offense.
“I’m going to do all I can,” Stone said. “I’ll be calling coaches throughout the country if I need to for advice. I’m not afraid to ask questions and I’m certainly not afraid to make adjustments.”
With the unfortunate loss of guard Shawna Nicols, who will not play this season due to numerous head injuries sustained throughout her career, the Badgers will open the season with an eight-player rotation.
Though Stone prefers the traditional ten-player squad, she has found success with shorthanded lineups in the past. In the 2000-01 season, Stone led Drake University to the NCAA tournament with a seven-player rotation.
“We went to the NCAA tournament my first year at Drake when we had cancer, a brain tumor and a broken ankle, and we played with seven players,” Stone said. “It can be done.”
With their lack of depth on the perimeter, the Badgers will move 6-foot-3 forward Ebba Gebisa to the small forward position and Rich, who led the team in scoring last season with 11.6 points per game as a shooting guard, will move to point guard.
Rich responded well in the opening exhibition game, hitting six three-pointers in a 29-point performance.
“I’m going to be playing a majority of the minutes with the team being thin in the guard spot, so I’ll have more opportunities to score points,” Rich said. “Coach Stone and the rest of the staff have complete confidence in me to shoot the ball.”