Foley OK with loss, if listening improves

Thursday, January 3, 2013

— What the UALR women’s basketball team saw last Saturday in Lafayette, La., wasn’t that big of a surprise.

At least not to Joe Foley.

The Trojans have had games this year where they haven’t run the coach’s motion offense as crisply as he would have liked, which has led to ill-advised shots that rattled off the rim.

But none of the other poor offensive performances had led to a loss - and certainly not a loss to a Louisiana-Lafayette team that had yet to win a Sun Belt Conference game this season and had lost to UALR 10 consecutive times.

“It sinks in more,” UALR junior forward Hanna Fohne said. “It shows where we need to improve and it shows that playing through success is hard, and we needed to learn that.”

UALR missed its first 21 shots in the second half of the 56-54 loss in double overtime and went more than 13 minutes in the half without scoring a point as its nine-game winning streak came to an end.

Foley’s points of empha-sis have been the same leading up to tonight’s 5:15 p.m. game against Sun Belt East Division co-leader Western Kentucky (11-2, 4-0), but this time they are being taken a bit more seriously.

UALR’s loss may have been just what it needed to snap out of its occasional offensive funks halfway through the regular season. UALR is just beginning its conference schedule, and it has yet to play the Sun Belt’s top contenders.

Foley said the Trojans (10-2, 3-1) played poorly on offense twice during their nine-gamewinning streak - against Memphis and South Alabama - but the struggles may not have been taken as seriously as needed since they came in victory.

“We had been talking about it and working on it for a while,” Foley said, “but when you’re young and winning it doesn’t really mean a whole lot to you.”

Foley has not been stressing making shots. Instead, he has emphasized that what happens early in the possession to create open shots is almost as important as actually making them in Foley’s motion offense.

Foley said his team was “very slow” and lacked intensity when making cuts and setting screens against Louisiana-Lafayette. He saw the same things in a Dec. 7 victory at Memphis, when UALR shot 38 percent in a 56-44 victory. He also saw those qualities in a 49-40 victory at South Alabama on Dec. 22, another 38 percent shooting performance.

The Trojans missed all 10 of their three-point attempts against Louisiana-Lafayette. Janette Merriex, a 38 percent three-point shooter, was 0 for 5 from behind the line. Taylor Gault was 0 for 3 on threepoint attempts and 7 of 25 overall from the floor.

“We just have to take better shots,” Gault said. “We kepttaking jumper after jumper even though we were missing. It just comes with knowing the game, getting your rhythm first.”

The loss will be easier to deal with, Foley said, if his team learns something from them. He said the same thing after a 78-68 loss to Missouri State in November, when UALR gave up 42 points in the lane. Since then, he’s seen better post defense.

“We’ll have more bad days. We’re too young not to have bad days,” Foley said. “We’ve been very fortunate. I know that we’ve got a lot to learn. It was one of those situations where we learned a tough lesson, or we better have.”

UALR women vs. Western Kentucky WHEN 5:15 p.m. today WHERE Jack Stephens Center, Little Rock RECORDS UALR 10-2, 3-1 Sun Belt Conference; Western Kentucky 11-2, 4-0 SERIES UALR leads 18-5 RADIO KARN-AM, 920, in Little Rock INTERNET ESPN3.com, ualrtrojans.

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Sports, Pages 15 on 01/03/2013