As they continue into the conference season, the women’s basketball team is taking away lessons from their loss to Illinois Wesleyan and win over Millikin Univeristy.
The Vikings are currently 2-4 in their last six games, but most of these losses have been in mostly single digit margins.
During their game against Illinois Wesleyan, the Vikings went up against the Wesleyan defense, who employed their full-court press right from the start of the game. This defense attributed to the 26 turnovers the Vikings had that night.
Head coach Mark Beinborn tried to get his team to adjust to the defense.
“They want you to slow down and be scared,” Beinborn said. “Or speed up and pass to the wrong places. We gotta take care of the ball and meet the ball. When we came back and tied it up, we had a couple of turnovers and they were lob passes. You can’t throw lob passes.”
While the Vikings struggled against the defense, according to senior and captain Marissa Pezzopane, one of the assistant coaches from Illinois Wesleyan praised the Vikings for adjusting and how they did against the offense compared to other teams.
Some of the elements that needed fine-tuning after the Vikings game against Wesleyan were offensive rebounding, shooting three-point shots and reducing turnovers.
Beinborn said that all those issues will be mended in the coming week’s practices.
“The big thing we gave up was offensive rebounds,” Beinborn said. “We’re gonna have to work on that a lot more. We work on blocking out in 90 percent of our practices, but it’s also about being tough and not getting pushed around.”
The Vikings were able to fine-tune some of those aspects in their game this past Saturday against Millikin University.
The Vikings only had nine turnovers against Wesleyan and hit two three-point shots, comparatively 17 turnovers less and two more three-pointers than during their game against Illinois Wesleyan.
While the Vikings got off to an early lead in their game against Millikin, Millikin managed to make a comeback on a 10-1 run. The Vikings managed to hold onto the lead, winning 65-59.
With their loss against Wesleyan and win against Millikin, the Vikings are sitting at an 8-10 overall record and a 3-4 record in the conference.
Pezzopane, who broke her 1,000 career point milestone in the game against Millikin, hopes the team can maintain one of their goals when they face off against Millikin in a few weeks.
“One of our goals is to beat a team, since we see them twice, at least once and then get those couple where we win both” Pezzopane said. “We take each game we play them first as a learning opportunity so that we can see now what we can do better so we can make those corrections.”
The Vikings have played each of the conference teams at least once and look to go 1-1 in their home game against North Park this weekend at 7 p.m.