The women’s basketball team knew it was going to need to play lights-out to beat the three-time-defending Iowa Conference champion, Simpson, on its home court in the semifinals of the postseason tournament.
Unfortunately for the Duhawks, they could not remove the lid from their basket for the first 10 minutes of their game against the No. 19-ranked team in Division III, allowing Simpson to jump to a 30-9 lead before the Duhawks knew what hit them. The puzzling thing about the early shooting slump was that Loras was getting the shots it wanted, according to Coach Justin Heinzen.
“I called a timeout and told the team that we couldn’t be playing better,” he said. “We had good layups and stuff; we just had to make a few shots.”
Loras did not go down without a fight, however, Senior Lindsay Bava led the charge with a game-high 25 points in her last game as a Duhawk. Sophomore Alex Hudson pitched in with 10 points and a game-high 12 rebounds.
“We did cut (Simpson’s lead) to 10 at halftime, and then we cut it down to single digits in the second half,” Heinzen said.
Simpson eventually put the game out of reach with another run midway through the second half en route to its 75-59 victory, but Heinzen liked how the Duhawks competed against the perennial conference power.
“If you’re going to win the conference tournament, you’re more than likely going to have to go through Simpson, and we expected that and knew that,” he said. “We competed pretty well. ”
The Duhawks finished the season with a 13-14 record, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Loras lost several close games early in the year that made its record deceiving.
“I think close games are a crap-shoot to predict and to plan for,” he said. “Early on, we lost every close game. If we can just get a grip on those, we’re a 20-win team.”
The Duhawks will lose just three athletes to graduation, but two of them are among the best players who have ever played for Loras. Bava will leave as one of the top scorers in Loras’ history, while Lisa Morrissey had moved up to No. 2 in school history for both assists and steals. The other senior, Mackenzie Roth, also will be missed.
Nonetheless, Heinzen can take solace in knowing that he’s got a good core of returning players. Whether any of the returnees can put up the kind of numbers that Bava and Morrissey did remains “pretty much up to them,” he said.
“So much of basketball in college is focused on summer and offseason and improvement,” Heinzen added. “There are a lot of players on our team this year that weren’t in the mix (this) year, and you never know who’s going to have a good summer. It’s so much an offseason sport.”
