Alli Volkens was too nervous to eat breakfast Monday morning.
Volkens and the rest of her teammates had to meet at 6:20 a.m. on Monday to do some extra running for not meeting their goals on Saturday in a 79-70 loss at Texas A&M-Kingsville, a game they led by 19 in the second half.
“I get really nervous when he (coach Brandon Schneider) brings the trashcans down to the side of the court,” Volkens said. “I thought, ‘Oh God, what’s he going to do to us?’”
The Lady Hornets had to run 53 down-and-backs, a punishment sure to be ingrained in their muscle memory tonight in the conference opener against Northwest Missouri.
The Lady Hornets enter the MIAA with a new focus. They are eager to get back on the floor to correct the mistakes they made on Saturday, including 27 turnovers, getting outrebounded and giving up too many points.
“We can’t take any opponent that we have for granted, and we just need to come out and focus,” sophomore forward Bree Kisner said. “A lot of us come out and we really aren’t focused at the beginning of the game, and we’ll have relapses. We just need to make sure we come out and take care of business for the whole 40 minutes instead of half the game.”
The Lady Hornets say their goals help them focus. They made new goals on Monday for the conference season, and Schneider wants his team to focus on the little things.
“You’ve got to dive on the floor,” he said. “You’ve got to box out. You’ve got to execute offensively. You can’t just show up and expect to win. You’ve got to do the things that are conducive to winning and stay away from the things that bring about losing. That’s what we did. We did way too many things that bring about losing.”
The Lady Hornets admitted that they had been able to relax in their first five regular season games, which they won by an average of 43.8 points. While the loss was upsetting, it could help them in the long run.
“We feel a little bit more prepared,” Volkens said. “I think if we would have blown out another team — I think it happened to us at a good time — it was a bad game to lose, but at least it happened before conference started.”
The Lady Bearcats should present an immediate challenge for the Lady Hornets to correct one of their flaws that troubled them at the Kingsville tournament: turnovers. They had 54 turnovers in two games at the tournament, and Northwest’s opponents are averaging 22.5 turnovers per game this year.
“Northwest does a tremendous job of forcing turnovers and then converting them into points, and that’s an area that we will really have to do a good job in,” Schneider said. “We’re going to have to take care of the basketball and beat their initial pressure, and then if we’re fortunate enough to do that, then we’re really going to have to execute and get good shots.”