Even through the slumps of the season, the Women’s basketball team is battling to keep their spirits alive in spite of a long losing streak that has dropped their rank to fourth right under Baruch.
“In our conference we’ve been up and down, but we have to stay consistent,” said Head Coach Winifred Brown.
The competition has been increasingly tough this season against more well-equipped and financed teams like Lehman, who are at the head of the conference. But that hasn’t stopped from the players to look at their failures and see them as building blocks to a better future season.
“I think we’re doing a lot better than last year as far as playing hard and trying to correct our errors” said Sophomore Shauncia McClendon.
They look to solve their problems through practice and bring it to the court. Execution on offense and defense is the key to their success this season.
“They are running plays, they’re working hard and definitely working on our defense because that’s basically our weak point,” said Coach Winifred Brown about the girls executing in practice.
McClendon is also pushing her teammates hard in practice so it translates onto the court against other opponents.
“We all practice at 100 percent, try to push our teammates as hard as possible,” she McClendon.
McClendon was disappointed with some games that the team lost this season, but certain games didn’t upset her because she knew it was the chemistry of the players.
The team is aware that they have a lot of work to do and it has to start on both ends of the court. They have won more games on the road than at home, and the mentality they have now is to be much better in the month of January and try to get to the top of the conference.
“I want to have a home quarterfinals game, we always end up going away because we are a low seed,” said McClendon. “I want to be able to play home at a high seed where we’re hosting a team so we can play in a comfort zone and not feel like we have to climb up a ladder, so we’re in a comfortable spot to go further in the playoffs than we usually do.”
“Their mindset is to stay on course with our conference play” said Brown.
In the past few seasons, the team has always been at the bottom of their conference, but this season they have an opportunity of staying in the top four spot.
“The one goal I would like to accomplish is to be in that top four, once you’re in the top four you make it to the playoff and it’s 0-0 and you have high hopes for getting to the championship level,” said Brown.
The team’s next game will be on Jan 6 at Brooklyn College.
