The University of Memphis women’s basketball team will get a taste of what Big Ten basketball is like when it travels to take on the Illinois Fighting Illini Thursday and returns home to take on the Minnesota Gophers Sunday.
The Lady Tigers enter Thursday’s contest with a 2-0 record, after handling Missouri State 79-63 and Samford 64-48 over the weekend.
Memphis coach Melissa McFerrin said she was pleased with her team’s performance over the weekend and was glad to see her team correct areas that needed attention.
“It was a good weekend,” she said. “I think if we looked at the two games, both really good wins, but the Sunday game was the game I would point to say we were a better basketball team on that day. I thought the Missouri State game we weren’t as focused defensively as we would have liked to have been. So it was good to see our team recognize that, come back on Sunday and have a really good defensive performance against a pretty good Samford basketball team.”
Through two games the Lady Tigers haves shown glimpses of great play from a few different players.
Redshirt sophomore guard Mooriah Rowser, a member of the American Athletic Conference All-Freshman Team last season, led the Tigers in their first two games, averaging 19.5 points per game. Not only has she shown how dangerous she is scoring the basketball, but she has been very efficient in doing so. She is currently shooting 38.7 percent from the floor and 33.3 percent behind the arc. She also is shooting 80 percent from the free throw line. She was named to the conference’s weekly honor roll after her solid start to the year.
Coach McFerrin was excited to see Rowser start the year out right, especially after suffering a knee injury that put her out the entire 2012-13 season.
“We needed that from Mooriah,” she said. “She is pretty anxious to be back on the court as a healthy, older Mooriah Rowser. She is pretty locked in on the offensive end of the floor, as far as being a scorer and getting the shots she can be successful at. It was awfully good to see her back and healthy this weekend.”
Junior forward Courtney Powell also showed how effective she could be this season, registering her first career double-double with 11 points and 11 rebounds against Samford on Sunday.
McFerrin said she believes Powell can be effective on both sides of the ball.
“Courtney has such great energy, and, if we can channel it in the right direction, she can be a great defender and very, very disruptive,” the seventh-year coach said. “She can be a great rebounder, and, if she can offensive rebound and score in simple ways, which Courtney is more than capable of doing, then she can be very impactful. Our team really likes her energy on the court and so do we. Now, she is able to execute our system enough and stay within our system and bring that energy to the court.”
The Lady Tigers all-time series record against Illinois is currently 1-3, dropping the last three games in a row to the Fighting Illini.
Illinois will also enter Thursday’s game 2-0, after beating both IPFW and Robert Morris. The Fighting Illini squeaked past IPFW with a 70-63 win, but recovered and defeated Robert Morris in a more convincing fashion, 66-48.
McFerrin said that besides athleticism and transition play, they do not know what all to expect with the Fighting Illini because they are such a young team.
“Their roster is so new,” she said. “In addition to Crawford who is there go to player and another four player, they have two transfers that are in the starting lineup and they have a boatload of freshman that are trying to figure out roles. The things we do know are that they are going to try to push the ball hard in transition, they are going to attack the rim.”
McFerrin believes the biggest challenge with this team will be facing their depth and size.
“It’s going to be a completely different ballgame than the last two,” she said. “We are going to see more size; we are going to see more depth. We might have an opportunity to mix up our defenses a little more than we did in the first two games, which I think we might like to do, but they are going to challenge us in a lot of ways not only physically, but with their size and the different defenses they are going to throw at us.”
Minnesota, currently 2-0, is coming off of two dominant performances over Southeastern Louisiana, 109-60, and Cleveland State, 93-76. Though the Gophers are not currently ranked, they have already received votes this season in this week’s AP Top 25 poll.
Gopher’s guard Rachel Banham, a senior, is considered one of the best players in the country after averaging 22.1 points pert game last season.
McFerrin said that Minnesota has a ton of talent, especially with Banham and will most likely be ranked very high at the end of the year.
“I think the University of Minnesota is surging,” she said. “I think under a new head coach here, they had talent with the previous head coach, but I think any time you have a new head coach it brings kind of a new energy. They have one of the top five players in the nation in Rachel Banham. And another six-foot-five post player that’s a sophomore that is very, very good. This is a NCAA tournament team and likely one we see – assuming they get in, which I think they will – I think they’ll be a team that is going to be ranked pretty high come the NCAA tournament.”
Coach McFerrin, who spent two seasons as the associate head coach at Minnesota from 2002-2004 and helped lead the gophers to a final four, is excited to matchup against her old team and is ready for the challenge.
“Minnesota was a place I dearly loved and still to this day love,” she said. “It was a great professional opportunity for me and great memories I had with the final four team there. The head coach is a player I recruited and coached in college and their associate head coach is a former coaching staff member at my days at Ohio state, so lots of connections, but the truth of the matter is the game is going to be a about Rachel Banham, and their very, very dynamic offensive system.”
McFerrin and the Lady Tigers have a tough test ahead of them this week, but believe this is a great way to gauge how good their team can be.
“These are two big ten teams – one on the road and one in our own gym – and these are the challenging type of games where we can really figure out what type of basketball team we have this year,” she said. “So we are excited to matchup against some good Big Ten teams.”
The Lady Tigers’ game against the Fighting Illini on Thursday will tip at 7 p.m. at the State Farm Center in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Sunday’s home game against Minnesota will tip at 2 p.m. at Elma Roane Fieldhouse.
