The St. Cloud State Women’s basketball program is coming off of a 16-11 (12-10 in NSIC) season in which they hosted and lost in the first round of the NSIC/Sanford Health Tournament against the University of Sioux Falls by a score of 75-68. The team lost 3 talented seniors in Rachael Moen, Sam Price, and Jessica Benson. Benson was named the female senior student-athlete of the year by St. Cloud State Athletics, she was also named to the Second Team All-Conference, and ranks in the top 10 in both defensive rebounding average (3rd at 5.8/game), blocks (10th with 55). All the while Benson lead SCSU in scoring and rebounding three years in a row. Sam Price was named to the Second Team All-Conference her senior year and got the nod for her work in the classroom with a Winter All-Academic Team selection. Sam Price made a team-high 59 three-pointers her senior season bringing her career total up to 186 good for 2nd all-time in program history.

So needless to say, the team is trying to find itself coming into this season and that is what makes Saturday’s exhibition game against the University of St. Thomas important. “I need to see what our team can do against other competition. It’s not necessarily about what anybody’s doing against us. It’s looking at what we can do, what are our rotations, who we think matches up well together, and those kinds of things. We always want to win, but from a coaching standpoint it’s not the main focus going into this game. It’s really more about figuring out our rotations and how our zone defense looks. What do we need to get better at with our man defense? Is our motion offense moving well or are we standing too much? So really for coaches, it’s more about getting a feel for some of the things that we need to work on that we don’t get to see in practice because we know each other so well.”

Out of the long list of things to watch for that Coach Fish rattled off she said the most important thing going into the St. Thomas game is figuring out the identity of the team. “We don’t know who we are right now. We graduated three seniors a year ago that did a lot for us. We hung our hat on them and they really carried us. So we haven’t figured out who we are now. Are we going to be that defensive team that can get stops when we need to? Are we going to be a team that shoots a lot of threes? Are we going to be that rebounding team? That’s who I’d like us to be: a team that’s going to dominate the boards. But we haven’t figured out who we are yet and I think that that’s going to be a process over the next month or so as we head into conference play. We need to figure out who we are, who our go to people are going to be, and where our leadership is going to come from.”

With so many unknowns coming into the start of the 2014-2015 campaign you start to look at what the team does know. The first thing that comes up is the team’s depth. According to Coach Fish there are at least 7 players that are legitimately vying for starting roles with less than a week to go before the season tips off. That kind of depth is something that the team sorely lacked last season, “I think last year we relied on our seniors, and I think this year it will be good to see who wants that opportunity. Last year we had a tendency, especially late in games, to defer to them (our seniors). So I think it will be nice to see our players step into that role this year. Lexy (Petermann) is one of those go to players that we can really count on because she can score for us in a variety of ways. That’s why she causes matchup problems, because she can play on the perimeter and she can play inside. We have Nichole Wittman who is a transfer that gets to play this year and we’ve seen some really nice things from her. She’s that same type of player that can face up and shoot the three really well, but can also finish around the basket. We thought Chelsea Nooker a year ago did some exciting things and we’ve seen her take her game to another level. From what I saw in her last scrimmage is she did a really good job getting to the offensive glass and we’re going to need that from her. I think she has a tendency to be too unselfish, she needs to look for her shot more because I think she’s a kid who’s capable of scoring in double figures every night for us. I think Carley coming back off of her knee injury a year ago is playing with a lot of confidence and shooting the ball well. I think that’s what exciting about this year. We have a variety of people who can do things and we don’t have to lean on those one or two people.”

On the downside the team is struggling with injuries out of the gate. Of the 17 players on the roster, currently 5 are injured (and 2 are season ending). Emma Konopasek is out with an injured ankle but is expected to return by late December or early January. However incoming freshman Mackenzie Uter is out for the year with an ACL injury that she suffered in her senior season at Howard-Lake-Waverly-Winstead high school and sophomore Kaytlin Kuefler is also out for the year.

The St. Cloud State Women’s basketball team will host the University of St. Thomas in an exhibition match at Halenbeck Hall on November 8th at 2pm. The game will be broadcast on the KVSC Sports Stream. The team will then kick off the season by traveling to the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology and begin their journey towards rewriting the playoff script of the last couple of seasons. As Coach Fish puts it, “The last few years, we’ve hosted the first round of the conference tournament and gotten beat… We have some unfinished business to do.”