"I should have known better. We win three games, two against good teams and I think this is going to be easy. Coach Ballard finally lets up on us after all those punishment practices, but she tells us that we're playing New Mexico State, the friggin' Aggies. UTEP hates the Aggies. We play two games with them every year, and they're not even in our conference.
All week long, it's 'New Mexico State this' and 'New Mexico State that'. It's in the Prospector, 'come see UTEP against the hated Aggies'. So we come out of the shootaround, and what kind of crowd is it? The same old sorry-ass crowd we always have. When I played in high school, we had bigger crowds that this for some games. If this game is so goddamned important, how come we can't get no love?
We see the Aggies. They don't look like much. Then they come out and they are on fire, they are beating us up like a bowling ball beats up pins. Everyone's trying to find me open, and I can't hit anything. I went, what, 9-for-35 for the game. I got 20 points, but -- hell, I should have had 30. Coach Ballard just lets me have it. Oh, she doesn't say anything in the locker room to me directly, but she's shouting at halftime in the locker room "Why don't you stop looking for #13! (me) She's not hitting anything!"
We're down by 23 going into halftime. The crowd is just quiet. The Aggies know they can win, and the only thing that kept us from losing by 23 was that the Aggies just ran out of gas. That, and that everyone finally stopped looking for me and found #55 (LaToya Lloyd) instead. Toya had 22 points. But it wasn't enough.
Their bigs just crushed us. #33 (Elise Connery) was knocking balls out of the sky. They got thin and matched #3 (Apryl Fieldson) against me and she just lit me up. She scored 11 points on me coming off the bench. I couldn't stop her. I was gassed. If I could have defended her we'd have kept it close. Our bench sucked. We sucked.
I go into that locker room and I'm crying. I've got a towel on my head. Everyone else is just staring into space, and Ballard hits that locker room like a hurricane. She said, 'if you cared as much as #13 does, you'd have won'. Great coach. Thanks for nothing. Make everybody hate me.
It's the march of the dead out of the locker room. No one is saying anything to anybody. Mackie (Immaculata Suarez) and I don't talk much back in our dorm room. She didn't even come off the bench, but she feels just as bad as I do."
--Brenda Dean
Agh. What a stinker of a game. For quite some time, I didn't believe that I got the balance between teams right and that UTEP was destined to win every game this year. Well, I guess that theory has been disproven. Even with 12 Team Index points, UTEP was awful.
I would say that the game fell apart in three directions:
1) Pearlie Kalis and Iorrie Molinero from UTEP both have secondary ratings that are higher than their field goal ratings. To me, this indicates a player who is a lot more comfortable with taking her own shot - shooting right after the action phase - than with waiting for the ADVANCE. UTEP's guards have poor defensive ratings, and that gave Kalis and Molinero all the more reason to light things up.
2) Dean shot very poorly. I don't think I've seen so many numbers in the 60s through 80s in my entire life. It seemed that everytime Dean put something up, it ended in disaster for UTEP.
3) Elise Connery of New Mexico State. Her block rating is "12", which means that any ball coming even close to her is going to get batted out of the sky. She led NMSU in rebounds with 13, assists with 5 and blocks with 9. UTEP doesn't have that kind of blocking power, and only blocked two shots the entire night.
4) Bench points. 29 for NMSU vs. 13 for UTEP. Apryl Fieldson went 5 for 6 against Dean, and the only time she missed was when Dean fouled her during the shot.
During the first half, NMSU shot 58 percent. UTEP shot 32 percent. That was the game right there. The hole was so deep that UTEP couldn't dig its way out of it. All of UTEP's Index Points were spent fending off defensive fouls and forced rests in the hope that Dean could find her way back into the game. But she couldn't. NMSU went up by 25 at one time in the second half, and that's when everyone started heading for the exits.
Up next. The UTEP Invitational. UTEP vs. Robert Morris. Stephen F. Austin vs. Idaho. I won't play the second game, but I will play the first one.
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