BLOOMINGTON — Indiana women’s basketball coach Teri Moren couldn’t find any bright spots when she read through the box score after a 72-68 overtime loss to Harvard.
The No. 24 Hoosiers (1-1; 0-0 Big Ten) shot the ball poorly and turned it over 27 times, but the struggles went even deeper than that. They were outscored in the paint 28-24, didn’t have any fast break points and barely got any production from its bench.
While Moren was highly critical of her team’s performance in a win over Brown earlier in the week, she struck a different tone on Thursday.
“We’ll have to go back and watch some of the things that went wrong and keep chipping away at it,” Moren said. “This is not the team it was a year ago. We have a lot of room to improve and grow and we will.”
“It may take us a minute, a couple games, I hope it’s just a couple to figure these things out.”
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After Harvard scored on its opening possession of overtime, Parrish had a rare opportunity to inbound the ball without anyone guarding the baseline. She tossed it to Moore-McNeil only for the ball to bounce off her fingertips and go out of bounds without a defender pressuring her.
That was the only time IU gift-wrapped a possession or basket to the Crimson on Thursday night. Those were the moments from the game that stuck out most to Moren especially since the Hoosiers made a half dozen similar mistakes against Brown.
‘Those are uncharacteristic of us, that’s not what we normally look like,” Moren said. “I’m more perplexed by it than worried because I know this group well enough to know they are competitors. They want to get it right and I’m confident that they will.”
There still was a strong sense of disappointment coming from IU’s locker room after the loss that ended the program’s 18-game home win streak. The Hoosiers had high expectations coming into the year with three veteran starters including fifth-year guards Chloe Moore-McNeil and Sydney Parrish.
“I think soul searching is a great way to put it,” Chloe Moore-McNeil said, of her reaction to the loss. “Not to knock off Ivy League, that’s a great league, but we’re Indiana, we have our expectations as well and clearly that was not it at all.”
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Inidana never looked comfortable trying to get the ball across half court and turned it over in just about every way imaginable in the face of Harvard’s aggressive full-court press.
Whenever the Crimson made a basket, they had a defender guarding the baseline and looked to trap the ball-handler on the inbounds pass. They did the same thing coming out of stoppages and didn’t let up even as foul trouble mounted.
“I think the hardest part about that is that the pressure was no surprise,” Moore-McNeil said. “…I think that’s just the hardest part, knowing we were supposed to be prepared for that and we didn’t show up for it.”
The point guard had a hard time even looking at the box score sitting in front of her during her post-game press conference.
“It’s hard to see that we have 27 turnovers,” Moore-McNeil said.
It was the second most turnovers in a single-game during Moren’s tenure. Yarden Garzon had a team-high seven turnovers — three of those were offensive fouls — and Lilly Meister had six turnovers.
All eight Hoosiers who played turned it over at least once.
Moren was surprised by the extent of IU’s struggles given the amount of practice time the coaching staff devoted to it leading up to the season. She wanted the Hoosiers to avoid a let down against the press like when they turned it over 22 times in a 74-69 loss to Ohio State last season.
Indiana took a step backwards on Thursday night with a series of mental errors — Moren said there were moments her team “panicked” — and an inability to handle a Harvard’s physicality particularly in the first quarter when she said her team got punched in the mouth.
“Not good enough,” Moren said.
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.
