Northwestern University Athletics
Mid-Conference Season Check-Up
1/18/2012 12:00:00 AM | Women's Basketball
Jan. 18, 2012
As we approach the mid-way point of the Big Ten season, NU special contributor Skip Myslenski visits with head coach Joe McKeown to see how he thinks his club, now 12-6 on the year, is performing. His answers may surprise you.
So now, for the first time this season, we turn our attention to the Wildcats, those women on the Northwestern basketball team, and we note their record (12-6) and their conference rank (middle of the pack) and then take a look at their season stats. There's the junior Kendall Hackney, who has started every game, leading them in scoring, and she is one we remember from last winter. She had a wonderful voice, a tendency toward over-thinking and an abiding desire to one day appear on the hit show Glee. We see she is now averaging 16.3 ppg, but learn soon enough that she is still searching for inconsistency. "We're trying to get her to be really consistent. That's a goal for us," her coach, Joe McKeown, will say then.
We next see that junior forward Dannielle Diamant, who is out of Las Vegas, is averaging 12.6 ppg, and there's another name that we recognize. She's the granddaughter of the former UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian, good old Tark The Shark, one of our favorites back when we were young and covered the college basketball map. It's says here that she started 17 games, but we learn soon enough that she was felled by illness during a December tourney in (ironically enough) Vegas, missed a game, played a game, got hurt early against Toledo and then played against Iowa when she should have sat. "Just now is she starting to find her traction," McKeown will say of her. "I thought the last three games, she's started to play really well."
We notice now that senior forward Brittany Orban has played just six games, and learn later that she was then sidelined for the season with a torn ACL, and that her spot in the lineup has been assumed by Allison Mocchi, the only other senior among this season's Cat Women. "She just made every hustle play, brought a toughness, got offensive rebounds, was always great screening somebody to get you open, all the little things that sometimes don't show up on the stat sheet," McKeown will say when asked the effect of losing Orban. "She just understood the work ethic in the weight room, the work ethic in practice, coming early to shoot and staying late. Just the example she set leadership wise."
Doesn't Mocchi, another senior, do the same?
"I think she does too, but different personalities. Ally was doing the same type things, then the week before the season started she got hurt (badly sprained ankle). She sat out for awhile, and just now is starting to get her stride back."
Finally our eyes fall on unfamiliar names, on the names of Morgan Jones and Karly Roser, and we see that each has been a starter all season and that Jones is averaging 12.6 ppg and that Roser is averaging 5.5 assists per game and that both--what's this--that both are mere freshmen. Jones, will we soon learn, had been Florida's Player of the Year as a high school senior and chose the `Cats over Missouri and Marquette, Michigan and Cal Berkeley. Roser, we learn next, is from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and has played for her nation's Under-17 team in France, for its Under-16 team in Mexico and for Hamilton as a 12-year old when it won the gold medal at the International Children's Games in Thailand.
"She's done a great job kind of learning as she goes after getting thrown into the fire," McKeown will say of Roser, his point. "She's had great games, she's made mistakes, made a free throw the other night with two seconds left to beat Illinois. No pressure, right? There's been a little transition for her to college basketball in the United States, the way we play. Some of the things that are taught are a little different. But just to be able to play all year round, to play against international competition, that's certainly helped her."
"She's can do a little bit of everything, but it's the same thing. She's been thrown into the fire too," he will then say of Jones, whose older sister Tailor is also on the team. "I think she's learning on the fly at how good players are on the other team. You know, in the high school situation, she was the best player, she was bigger, stronger, faster than everybody. Now she's getting the other team's best defender and she's learning how to handle that. But the two of them, they've held up really well."
They, in fact, have skirted the M*A*S*H tent that has accompanied the Cat Women through their season, which is where we now steer our conversation with McKeown. "We've been taped, wrapped, glued together, go play," he says with a soft chuckle. "It's been a big challenge dealing with so many different injuries on different fronts at different times. You go into a game or a weekend with a practice plan, a game plan, but we've had to be really flexible.
"If you asked me what I thought when we started, I thought we had a chance (to be really good). We had some depth, we had 13 players at practice. A couple weeks ago, we had six. But when you hire a coach who's been around a long time, the expectations for me are you just deal with it and move forward. You don't use it as a crutch. You go out and play. You go out and compete. I think we have that attitude, our players. We really have focused, the last two weeks especially, on us rather than the opponent. We're just trying to control the things we can."
In those last two weeks, which followed a blowout defeat at Iowa, his Cat Women have steadied themselves and gone 2-2. They lost at home to Minnesota by eight, but this was a three-point game entering the last minute. They won at Indiana by eight. They lost at Ohio State by 10, but this was a six-point game until they started fouling in the last minute. ("Offensive rebounding cost us that game, and some turnovers. Turnovers have really been an Achilles for us," McKeown will say.) Then, last Monday, they defeated Illinois by a point.
"A lot of coaches are all cliches and I don't want to talk like that," McKeown will finally say on this Wednesday, some 36 hours before his team hosts Michigan. "But regardless of what happens, it's more about how we stick together. We've kind of adopted this bunker mentality that it's really about us now. I'd be really happy, I'd be really pleased if we just play together and enjoy being a team. The wins and losses, they are what they are. But when we evaluate this whole year, to me, it has to be based on how we stuck together and became a team. Coaches, because they're with their team everyday, they know when it's right and when it's not right. Attitude and energy and the locker room. We try to max those out everyday."
You sound pleased with this group, we then tell him.
"I am. I am," he says. "I'm frustrated. There's been a lot of days since November when we haven't been able to do what I would like to do. But I'm also pleased with the way they've responded."
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