Coach pushes starters hard
Published Feb. 23, 2007
With the exception of a home loss to Nebraska and the season's first game at Southern Illinois, Missouri women's basketball coach Cindy Stein has used the same starting lineup for every game this season.
On Wednesday night, those starters had perhaps their heaviest load of the season when four of them were asked to play at least 36 minutes.
But the starting five — seniors Tiffany Brooks; Carlynn Savant; EeTisha Riddle and Blair Hardiek along with sophomore Alyssa Hollins — met the task. They scored every one of Missouri's 69 points in their win against the Kansas State Wildcats.
Stein said the Wildcats' offensive game plan of busting through traps and switching heavily forced her to give the starters more minutes than usual.
"You have to respect Kansas State's offense a lot," she said. "It takes a lot of experience to defend them. We had to keep the starters in to stop their offense. It was a combination of being better defensively with the starters and the fact that it was such a close game down to the end."
Prior to Wednesday, the bench was averaging 18.2 points per game, and no starter was averaging more than 32 minutes. Perhaps nobody experienced more of a shock than Riddle, who averages 31.9 minutes per game but played 38. Riddle said she got tired, but the closeness of the game carried her.
"Throughout the game, the energy level was up and down," she said. "But we dug deep and got that push to go through."
In previous wins, the bench has helped carry Missouri when the starters have been in foul trouble. But the team only totaled 14 fouls, something that Stein said was key.
"It was huge for us to stay out of foul trouble," she said. "We really hung in there and were able to keep our experienced players on the floor."
But the starting five seemed more like a starting four with Hardiek only playing 23 minutes and scoring just two points. When she was out, her replacements, freshman Toy Richbow and junior Kassie Drew, kept feeding Brooks and Riddle the ball. Kansas State coach Deb Patterson praised the way those two helped carry the Tigers.
"Riddle kept getting easy looks in the interior," she said. "And Brooks has really matured into a great Big 12 player."
But for all the experience that MU has with four senior starters, it was the lone underclassman, Hollins, who hit the biggest shot. Leading by two with 31 seconds left and the shot clock running down, she drained a fadeaway 14-foot jump shot to seal the win for the Tigers.
MU has now won three games in a row to move into 10th place in the conference with two games left to play. Stein said she didn't intend to have the starters play so much, but she's comfortable having four of them play nearly every minute.
"Our starters get us going," she said. "They have a lot of experience and they can continue to make plays the way they did tonight."