BLOOMINGTON — Things are starting to turn around for Indiana women’s basketball.
The Hoosiers slogged through their first three games of the year, surviving despite sloppy play against Brown but falling to Harvard and Butler. It became very evident, very quickly, that this team was different than the ones that reached three Sweet 16s in the last four years. IU bounced back with nice wins over Stanford, Columbia, and Baylor, but closed out November with another clunker against North Carolina.
But IU has seemingly settled in during December. The team capped off the month with a dominant 83-52 victory over Wisconsin at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall on Saturday, extending its winning streak to six.
On the whole, Indiana is playing much better basketball heading into the meat of Big Ten play.
“We still have so much room to grow, there’s no question for this group. And I do think that they feel good about how we’re trending right now,” IU head coach Teri Moren said after the Wisconsin game. “They realize there’s so much basketball ahead of us. We have so much work still to do, but I feel like there’s a confidence in how we’re trending here in the last month.”
IU battled health issues for the first two months of the season. Sophomore Lenée Beaumont, expected to be a useful backcourt bench piece, is out for the season. Lexus Bargesser missed time at the beginning, and then Sydney Parrish suffered an injury shortly after the junior returned to action. Parrish is now back and settling in again, but junior Yarden Garzon went down late in Saturday’s game, and Moren did not yet have an update on her status during the postgame press conference.
Henna Sandvik’s improvements into a more serviceable bench option have been huge for IU in overcoming those issues, particularly in December.
Those availability problems are just one of many things Indiana’s had to overcome so far this year. This team has had to figure some things out with a new group of players, and to adjust to life without All-American forward Mackenzie Holmes.
Moren and her players have preached all along that it might take a bit to work through some of those obstacles. There’s the stylistic, system aspect, of reworking some of the things Indiana does without Holmes in the paint. But there’s also the mental, comfort aspect of it — Holmes represented a fail-safe option for IU throughout her career, someone who could make a play if nothing else was working.
“When you’re trying to figure out how to play differently — when I say differently, (I mean) without an All-American post player. It takes time. It’s a process,” Moren said. “We’re not putting the ball inside as much as we did when Mack was here. So you have to find other ways to to score the ball. And I think it’s just been a matter of time for us to figure out what that looks like for us. Some of it is playing fast, some of it is making sure that when we execute, we get our pieces where we want them.”
And now, heading into a gauntlet filled with difficult Big Ten opponents, Indiana has found its groove. The second win of this six-game streak, over an impressive Southern Indiana team, required a second-half comeback to stave off another upset. But since then, the Hoosiers have been rolling. They pulled out a good 15-point road win over Penn State, and then posted blowouts over Bellarmine, Oakland, and now Wisconsin.
The turnaround has been largely been fueled by impressive ball movement. Indiana, over the last three games, has recorded 27, 27, and 25 assists. It’s the program’s first stretch of three straight games with at least 25 assists in at least 10 seasons. IU is playing at a faster tempo, trying to get out in transition quicker and force overly aggressive closeouts and helps from opposing defenses to set up the extra passes for open shots.
That was the case against Wisconsin, with 22 fastbreak points for the Hoosiers. And they had six players with multiple assists — Chloe Moore-McNeil led the way with seven, Garzon added five, Bargesser had four, Parrish finished with three, and Sandvik and Shay Ciezki each recorded two. And they finished with just eight turnovers — they’ve averaged a manageable 11 per game during the December winning streak.
Moren has preached playing in space, and playing with pace. She knows how much better IU is when it moves the ball around like this. And it’s showed with Indiana’s recent results.
“We really emphasize right now getting the ball up out of bounds quickly and getting up the court fast. I think you saw from Shay and from Chloe today, especially, just trying to get the ball up, high assists, low turnovers, and that’s going to win us basketball games in the long run,” Parrish said. “We only had eight turnovers today as a team, which is really good, and 25 assists. So if we can continue to play like that, continue to share the ball, we’re going to see a lot of success.”
The improved ball movement and chemistry has made way for better defense, and more consistent scoring. IU now has four players averaging double-digit scoring on the season — Garzon (14.1), Ciezki (11.9) Lilly Meister (11.8), and Parrish (10).
Indiana has a tough stretch coming up. Five of its next six games are against teams ranked in the top-40 on Bart Torvik — UCLA, Iowa, Illinois, USC, and Oregon. This turnaround has come against teams not close to that level. The Hoosiers still have a lot to prove.
But given how turbulent IU’s beginning of the season was, this is a pretty encouraging position for the team to be in entering January.
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