Wilmington Hands OU its first loss of the '07-'08 Campaign

If the undefeated season must come to an end, then I'm glad it ended in the fashion it did on Sunday night. You might say, "We lost by 10, and gave up a double digit lead in the final 15 minutes, how is that a good loss?" I'm not saying it's a good loss, but the lady Petrels have to be walking away with a lot of confidence after that loss. The effort Sunday was awesome; both teams wanted nothing less than a victory, unfortunately Wilmington owned the lead when time expired. The lady Petrels must keep in mind that they lost to a really good Wilmington team. But here is why I'm still confident even after suffering our first loss of the '07-'08 campaign; we could've easily won. I'm not gonna say we should've won because Wilmington is every bit as good as we are, but if we shoot a little better in the second half we win the game. If you look at the box score and see a 1-18 from 3pt land in the second half you may conclude that OU was just jacking 3's from anywhere, but they weren't. We had some great looks at the basket in the second half and the shots just didn't fall, you can't fault the Ladies for that. Sometimes the shots just don't fall, all I can say is it just wasn't our night.

I guess I'm still so confident about our team because I don't think we played our best game and we still controlled the game for about 30 minutes. It's not as if we played above and beyond our norm and still lost to Wilmington; we just sputtered some down the stretch and couldn't hang on to the victory. I know we can play better and we're gonna get stronger as the season rolls forward. You do have to give the Lady Quakers a lot of credit, they played really hard and never gave up even when they got down by 13 or so (I could be off some on the point spread here) early in the second half. We have to put this one behind us; no more talking about the could haves and should haves.

This coming weekend is a big weekend of SCAC basketball as we take on Centre Friday night in Danville and then DePauw Sunday afternoon in Greencastle, and for those who follow SCAC basketball you know how tough conference play on the road can be, especially when playing in Greencastle. It's time to focus on conference play! 10-0 would have been great, but I'm not gonna complain with a 9-1 mark and I don't think that any of the lady Petrels, coaches, or fans will truly be complaining about a 9-1 record right now.