Shooting Woes

November 23

When you’re having an off day, you can’t afford to make many mistakes. If you’re not hitting shots, everything else you do must be done very well in order to stay in the game.

Today, in a 47-32 loss to a defensively-minded Mount Holyoke squad, we couldn’t hit a shot. Every team has its shooting woes, but ours unfortunately didn’t end at any point today. After coming out early and grabbing a 7-2 lead, we didn’t hit a shot for a very long stretch of time and managed just 11 first-half points.

Our inability to score wasn’t solely a case of poor shooting. Similar to Saturday’s game, we struggled to execute our plays, and therefore forced shots. When you get in a slump, you have to work your way out of it, and we in no way did that in the first 20 minutes of play.

The second half was definitely an improvement- our intensity was greater and we were much more efficient with the ball. Unfortunately, our shooting slump continued. Despite that, we still managed to hang in there and lost the second half by just two points. But we had dug ourselves a hole we couldn’t climb out of.

With over a week to go before our next game, it was disappointing to go into that stretch with a loss, particularly in a game we thought we should have won. There were some sequences, where our execution and patience was what we expect from ourselves. For us, it isn’t a matter of having the effort or the ability. It is a matter of keeping those consistent throughout a game instead of just showing up in spurts. We have the pieces, but we have to put them together in order to get the results we want. This isn’t an uncommon issue in teams as young as ours. We are definitely asking a lot of people who have never been in situations like this before. But the bottom line is that making excuses doesn’t get us the wins, so why make them? We must instead overcome the difficulties of being such a young team and surprise people with what we are capable of accomplishing.