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Sports

Season opener not too good

by ARIE GRAHAM 
The Daily Cougar

With a seven-player rotation the Cougars lost their regular season opener against Texas Tech 51-69. The Cougars played the game without their major scoring threats, junior guard Tye Jackson, who is out with an injury, and sophomore guard Sha’Ratta Hawkins was quiet throughout the game scoring only three points. 

The surprise of the night was freshman center Ryan Bradley who provided a spark of the bench scoring 11 of her 18 in the first half.

"With the loss of Tye (Jackson) they told us that we needed to step up and that is basically what we tried to do tonight," Bradely said. 

Head coach Joe Curl said the team did not lack leadership but experience with four newcomers on the floor.

"We have several players who were playing their first college game," Curl said. "They were not used to switching the defenses and they had trouble getting into it."

Curl said despite the loss he felt that the positives outweighed the negatives of the game.

"I felt like we lost to a better team." Curl said. "I was just a little disappointed that we didn’t play better in the execution department."

The Cougars found themselves down by eight points at the half, although they could not stop the Texas Tech offense from shooting 48 percent from the field. Curl said that he felt they did a decent job of rotating in the players but Texas Tech got on a roll and it were hard to stop.

"I felt that we got rubber legged towards the end and I tried to use out time-outs in a smart way," Curl said. "We gave it the best we had we just have to get better."

Bradley said she felt that as an overall team that they did a good job and just because they were playing against a Big 12 team did not mean that they couldn’t compete.

"We did everything that the coach told us to do, we just need to work on our conditioning," Bradley said.

Although they could never get the lead down to less than sex the Cougars Curl said that the team still showed that they had some fight. The Cougars out rebounded the Raiders 41-39 with senior forward Ryan Meyers pulling down 16.

"They were a bigger team and for us to do that makes me feel encouraged," Curl said. "Rebounding is in direct correlation with success on a basketball court."

Playing against a team like Texas Tech Curl said the team will get the experience they need to be prepared for conference play, but they are not were they want to be just yet.

"Our goal is to win our conference, but we are taking every one of these games as serious as possible," Curl said.

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