BLOOMINGTON — Ugly wins and uglier losses.
Indiana women’s basketball head to State College on Saturday to open Big Ten play coming off a 10-day stretch where they beat the No. 17 team in the country, lost to UNC by 30 and barely avoided a loss to USI at Assembly Hall.
The Hoosiers (6-3; 0-0 Big Ten) are searching for consistency, but that’s not a totally unexpected development for coach Teri Moren.
“I don’t think any of us walked into this at the beginning of the season thinking that our line to success was going to be a straight line,” Moren said, after IU’s 15-point comeback against the Screaming Eagles. “I think we all kind of felt like we were going to be up and down. I tried to prepare the kids for that.”
Moren knew there would be an adjustment period with the program’s all-time leading scorer Mackenzie Holmes moving down the bench to a graduate assistant role and Sara Scalia taking her 3-point shooting touch overseas.
Those wild swings in performance highlight a team still trying to find its footing and injuries have only made things worse.
Moren hasn’t had a full complement of players this year with Lexus Bargesser, Lenee Beaumont and Sydney Parrish all missing time. While Bargesser returned to the lineup in the Bahamas, Beaumont (knee) is undergoing a surgical procedure in the coming weeks and will be sidelined indefinitely.
The hope for Parrish (knee) is that she will only miss a few weeks of play after suffering a knee injury during the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament.
It’s part of the reason Moren isn’t pushing the panic button just yet.
“The best recipe for us is to stay the course,” Moren said.
Moren said her players are living up to the high standard she sets behind the scenes — one example she gave was players still coming into the facility on a daily basis to get in extra work without the coaching staff — and focused on pushing past those recent struggles.
Here’s three ways that IU can make that happen:
Indiana women’s starting backcourt needs to mesh
The chemistry between Chloe Moore-McNeil and Shay Ciezki is a work in progress.
Ciezki, who spent her first two seasons at Penn State, is still getting comfortable with the more disciplined offensive approach in Bloomington while Moore-McNeil is adjusting to playing long stretches where she’s not IU’s primary ball-handler.
It’s made for possessions where the Hoosiers just look confused, and part of the reason they are averaging 16.0 turnovers per game. Ciezki is averaging a career-high 2.8 turnovers per game and Moore-McNeil is also averaging a career-high (2.6).
When IU got back from the Bahamas, the coaching staff installed some new plays to avoid moments where the ball just stops moving and forces someone to make a bad decision.
Indiana will be a much more dangerous team if the guards are playing with confidence on a nightly basis. There have been glimpses — Ciezki dropped 34 points on Baylor and Moore-McNeil had 22 points and four assists against Maine — but the only game this season where they’ve both been that effective at the same time was Stanford.
They combined for 40 points (14 of 24) with four 3-pointers in the 79-66 win.
Indiana women’s basketball forward Lilly Meister has to be more ‘assertive’
Whenever Indiana starting forward Lilly Meister fades into the background, the team is worse off for it.
Meister had the tough task of stepping into the starting lineup for the most productive (and popular) player in team history with only one career start.
There’s even been stretches this season when her play at the rim has resembled that of her mentor. She exploded for eight points in less than four minutes in the third quarter of a win over Columbia and had 14 points in the third quarter against Maine.
It’s why Moren wants Meister to be more “assertive” going forward.
“We have to get (Lilly) to beg for the ball a little bit more,” Moren said.
Moren also wants to see Meister adjust to longer stretches on the floor. Holmes averaged 28-plus minutes in four straight seasons for the Hoosiers, but Meister isn’t at that kind of conditioning level just yet. She’s only played more than 30 minutes once in IU’s first nine games.
“Personally, I’d like to keep Lilly on the floor longer, but we have a hard time doing that when she fatigues and when she’s tired, she’s either going to foul or come up short with her shot,” Moren said.
Indiana women’s basketball has to rely on ‘old school’ defensive mentality
Moren felt a sense of déjà vu watching her team earlier this week.
Indiana managed to erase a 15-point deficit against Southern Illinois despite shooting just 35.6%. The key stretch came in the fourth quarter when the Hoosiers held USI without any points for five-plus minutes.
“I’m old school,” Moren said. “I believe that you hang your hat on the defensive side of the ball, if it’s low scoring, it’s low scoring. You still give yourself a chance if you can execute the defensive plan.”
It was the type of performance that reminded Moren of how her IU teams of old managed to regularly win 20-plus games.
Indiana’s 73-65 win over then-No. 17 Baylor in the Battle 4 Atlantis was another example. The Hoosiers pulled out the victory despite shooting 37.5% (5 of 17 from 3-point range), by holding one of the top scoring teams in the country to two points (no field goals) through the first seven minutes of the fourth quarter.
The Bears also turned it over five times during that stretch.
That kind of consistent defensive intensity could be the key for a roster that’s lacking the same of offensive firepower that fans have become accustomed to in recent years.
While it’s not an easy ask — it requires near constant communication, strong fundamentals to properly execute the proper rotations and maximum effort — Moren feels like her team can do it.
“We’re playing in a day in age where everybody wants to see high-scoring, and trust me I want to score too, you have to in order to win the game, but I don’t want to get away from how we built this thing,” Moren said. “We’ve been a very difficult team to play against, we really try to take what you want to do away. We’re not there yet, we still have to work and continue to grow with this crew.”
Michael Niziolek is the Indiana beat reporter for The Bloomington Herald-Times. You can follow him on X @michaelniziolek and read all his coverage by clicking here.
