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Women’s basketball falls to Loyola, looks forward to next year

A week after the men’s basketball team ended its season against Northern Iowa in the Missouri Valley Conference Tournament, the women’s basketball team’s year ended in the same manner.

Only the women’s team had its season end by Loyola-Chicago for the second straight year, losing 67-55.
The women’s team, which swept Loyola in the regular season, fell victim to a first half of cold shooting and could not recover, even with stoic defense.

“We turned them over 31 times, but we shot 18 percent in the first half,” women’s head coach Michael Brooks said. “The normalcy and that [big] stage played into the fact that we didn’t perform to the best of our ability that day.”

The normalcy that Brooks referred to came from on the court as well as off the court.

“I had to leave; I wasn’t at practices for the last week of our season because of my mother’s illness and I wanted to be there for her passing,” Brooks said. “Life trumps basketball at times. My staff did a wonderful job of preparing them.”

Despite the staff’s efforts to prepare the team in Brooks’ absence, they couldn’t overcome Loyola, who led by 18 with 12 minutes left in the second half.

With the team’s season reaching it’s end, Brooks took note of the six freshmen that saw major time over the course of the year.

“I don’t think we can be any happier with the adjustment to college, the way that they learned how to play the college game and [how they] started to play as one,” Brooks said. “It was very difficult for them to be thrown in the fire.”

Freshmen such as Tamya Sims, Anneke Schlueter and Danielle Brewer all saw significant time in the latter portion of the season due to their performance, which Brooks said has improved immensely since the beginning of the year.

“I don’t think there was one of them that we weren’t happy with their progress,” Brooks said. “Now we can start to build because they understand what this process is like and what the Valley is like.”

However, as pleased as Brooks was with the freshmen, he voiced his disagreement with Sims not making either the MVC All-Freshmen or the MVC All-Defensive team.

“I think it’s a travesty that she didn’t make the freshmen team… and didn’t make the defensive team as the number one shot blocker in the league,” Brooks said. “I’m not really quite sure what drugs the other coaches were on.”

Despite their dismal record of 6-24, Brooks said that his team’s defense, led by Sims, was one of the biggest positive take aways from the season.

“I think the last few games of the year showed you what we can do,” Brooks said. “We could lock people down, [and] we could hold people below 65 points. Our problem was putting the ball in the hole.”

Brooks also said that even though generating offense was their main issue this past season, a full offseason of work will establish each player’s role for the 2015-2016 season.

“We’ve got to generate more offense in the half court, and I think we have kids that can do that,” Brooks said. “I think it’s going to take a little more time this offseason for them to establish their new roles, but it’s great that we have them for the fall and in the summer.”

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