The UNI women’s basketball team was defeated 74-41 by Iowa at home Sunday. With an attendance of 7,146, it was the largest crowd for a women’s athletic event in McLeod Center history.
It started as a defensive shootout. The Hawkeyes were held without a field goal for the first five minutes, but connected on eight second chance points in the first quarter. UNI hit just three field goals in the opening stanza. A minute into the second quarter, Iowa’s Chit-Chat Wright hit a bucket to put the Hawkeyes up double digits, and they never looked back. The Panthers were held off the board for the first three minutes of the second, and were held to just three field goals in the period. Iowa hit six of its final eight shots of the first half and held a 21-11 rebounding advantage at the break.
Taylor McCabe hit back-to-back three-pointers to get the Hawkeyes rolling in the third quarter, which also began with the Panthers missing 10 shots in a row. UNI went on another long scoring drought by missing its final seven shots of the third, before Wright hit two three-pointers early in the fourth quarter to help put the game out of reach. Iowa Coach Jan Jensen says they bounced back from a slow start in their first road game.
“We were a little flat to come out, I think that might have stymied us,” Jensen says. “As a coach, you’re always a little concerned about that first road trip. We do have nine new people, and you’re trying to explain what the road’s gonna feel like, trying to tell them what your routine is gonna be. And I just felt like we just looked a little sluggish. Credit to UNI at the beginning. But I feel like our offense just wasn’t there, but our defense certainly held. I’m thankful when our offense was a little sluggish that we did have our defense going. But I think it’ll be good learning for us because obviously now we go on the road for two really tough road games. Thankful it’s at a neutral site.”
UNI Coach Tanya Warren says they tried to slow the game down, but Iowa’s physicality was a key difference.
“I thought our defensive game plan was pretty good, I thought we did a nice job of executing, I thought our prep was good,” Warren says. “But their length, their athleticism, they hurried us up a lot and then they just dominated us on the glass. And it’s a physical game. We’ve got to go back to work and really work on boxing out. But right now when you look at the three games that we’ve lost, a lot of it has come from missed free throws and missed layups. So those are all correctable things that we have to come back to the gym and get better at.”
Warren says this year’s team is a work in progress, having lost four 1,000-point scorers from last year’s team.
“We’re a work in progress. We have five kids on our roster that have played at this level, and we’re very inexperienced. This is our youngest team in 17 years, but that’s okay. We’re going to continue to grow and get better. We could have taken the high road and not scheduled as hard as we did, knowing what we had coming back, but that’s not what we do. This non-conference schedule will continue to make us better, and we’ve just got to stay true to the process. And sometimes you gotta take the scoreboard out of it. And right now we’re in that phase where it’s not about the scoreboard, it’s about how much better can we get.”
Bri Robinson led the Panthers with 15 points. They’ll return to action Thursday at Creighton. Led by Wright’s 19 points, the Hawkeyes will next compete Thursday in Orlando against Baylor.
