The Bradley women’s basketball team did something this past week it hasn’t done since 1996 – the team scored 100 points in a game that ended in regulation time. The Braves beat Eureka Sunday afternoon, 103-59 in a game where Bradley outscored the Red Devils 84-38 after the first quarter.
The first quarter was a challenging one for Bradley as Eureka outscored the Braves 21-19. Head coach Andrea Gorski said her team fell behind because it was trying something new.
“We’ve been working on some new presses, and we wanted to run those in the first half, even though it’s not the right game plan for Eureka because we leave some shooters open,” Gorski said. “We wanted to work on it anyway … It was just more trying to work on something we put on in practice and seeing what we could get out of it.”
Sophomore forward Vanessa Markert and junior guard Dani Brewer, who each scored 17 points, led the Braves in scoring. Senior forward Leti Lerma added 16 points and grabbed 14 rebounds for her second double-double on the season.
Gorski said she hoped the game would “give their shooters some confidence” as the season moves forward.
“We’ve been struggling to hit some outside shots,” Gorski said. “That was what we thought would maybe get them going again.”
Things didn’t quite work out the way Gorski wanted Wednesday night as the Braves ran into a talented Green Bay squad where it shot 33 percent as a team and lost 68-43.
“Their length bothered us,” Gorski said. “They’re pretty tall at every spot, and we had a hard time getting the ball inside. [Green Bay] did a good job of guarding our post with one player, and then we didn’t move the ball as well as we needed to … They switched a lot of screens, and we just weren’t cutting the gaps as well as we should have. It was just stagnant.”
One of the bright spots for the Braves against Green Bay was junior guard Anneke Schlueter. Schlueter had 21 points on 8-14 shooting and made four of her seven shots behind the arc.
Bradley now turn their sights toward Northern Illinois as they host the Huskies tat 7 p.m. tonight at Renaissance Coliseum. It’s the Braves’ last home game of the 2016 calendar year and they won’t play in Peoria again until Jan. 13.
The Huskies average 95 points per game and run a fast-paced offense. Gorski said she realizes defense and playing their style of basketball will be the key to getting a win over NIU.
“They’re hard-to-guard one-on-one because they’re very crafty,” Gorski said. “You think you got them stopped, they spin, they step through … So we got to work a little bit on being more disciplined on one-on-one defense and knowing where we can help off of and who we can’t. Offensively, we have to work on getting the ball in the post. We’ll have an advantage there … We just have to be more aggressive offensively.”
