Blue White Illustrated

attacking the rim. Playing our style and our pace is really going to fit her well." McDaniel, a 5-foot-10 junior guard from Inkster, Mich., has thrived in the en- vironment that Kieger has been fostering, noting that the new coach "just doesn't settle. She won't let us settle to be mediocre, and that's been the main thing. We're never trying to be average at any- thing. You keep doing something until you become elite." That transition – from average to elite – is one that the entire program is looking to embark upon. The Lady Lions faded from Big Ten title contention toward the end of Coquese Washington's tenure, fin- ishing with nonwinning records in four of her final five seasons. They haven't been to the NCAA tournament since 2014, a five-year absence that is tied for the longest in the program's history. Kieger was brought in to end the drought, but no one is anticipating a quick fix. In ESPN's breakdown of the up- coming Big Ten season, none of its three women's hoops experts had the Lady Lions finishing better than 11th in the regular season. It wasn't hard to under- stand their skepticism. In addition to hir- ing a new coach, Penn State graduated one of the best scorers in its history, Teniya Page, and it suffered a major off- season blow when senior guard Jaida Travascio-Green, one of the most prolific 3-point shooters in school history, went down with a season-ending ACL injury. Kieger concedes that the Lady Lions lack depth. That would be a problem under any circumstances, but it's espe- cially vexing given the staff's desire to play an up-tempo, full-court style that gener- ates more than 100 possessions per game. She says her goal this season is to reach the NCAA tournament, a feat she accom- plished in each of her final three seasons at Marquette. But she's realistic about the improvements that must occur first. "Are we going to snap our fingers and be an NCAA tournament team? Absolutely not. But we're going to work for it every single day, 200 feet at a time, one prac- tice, one weight room session at a time," she said. "Hopefully that work will pay off when the Big Ten tournament comes around, [and] on the NCAA selection show, we'll hear our name." Kieger said the first step toward that goal has been to establish a team culture that prizes discipline. To be on time in her program is to be late. If practice is sched- uled to begin at 7 a.m., she wants every- one in uniform and ready to go at 6:50. Just as important, Kieger said, is the will to compete. She wants her players to push each other to greater heights so that they'll be better prepared to take on the challenges of a rugged Big Ten schedule. "Everything we do has a winner," she said. "We try to enforce that it pays to be a winner. We have different stuff every day. When we're in the weight room, there are always competitions. We have our green light drills in practice where everything is timed and scored, so when they're doing a shooting drill, they're going to know what they got last time, they're going to know what the overall record is, and they're going to know what we need to do to get better. "We have a thing in our program called the Lion Cup. The team is split up into four teams. Everything is tracked: GPA is tracked, team-building is tracked, com- munity service is tracked, you name it. So the whole entire year is a competition, a season-long competition. In everything we do, there is a winner and there is a loser. At the end of the day, you want to be Opening games yield mixed results Carolyn Kieger was not a happy coach after watching her Penn State women's basketball team drop its home opener to Rider on Nov. 10. The Broncs had reeled off 17 consecutive points in the first quarter and never re- linquished their early lead, dealing Penn State a 78-70 loss in Kieger's first regular-season game in the Bryce Jor- dan Center. "I want to give my props to Rider," she said. "They absolutely deserve that win. They outplayed us, they out- hearted us, they out-hustled us. They absolutely had more juice than us, and that's on me as a coach to fix. But I'm very disappointed in our energy and our efforts." The Lady Lions, who had opened their season five nights earlier with a 73-67 victory at Towson, had been hoping to use full-court defensive pressure to keep the Broncs on their heels but were quickly forced to aban- don that plan. "It's hard to do [that] when you're doing it at 50 percent effort," Kieger said. "We had to back up because the team wasn't doing it to our full head of steam. When you're trying to press or trying to trap and you're not doing it with all effort, you're going to get scored on, which is what was happening to us. In the second half when we decided to play, and we decided to get up there and press and do what we were supposed to do, I thought our team did a great job making that run. But at that point it was too little, too late." The Lady Lions were much more successful in their next game, a visit from defending Atlantic 10 champion Fordham. The Lady Lions excelled on both ends of the floor, holding the Rams scoreless for six minutes in the second quarter, while hitting 53.2 per- cent of their own shots for the game (65.2 percent in the second half) in a 72-59 victory. Siyeh Frazier finished with 19 points for Penn State, while Kamaria Mc- Daniel had 18. It was the 950th victory in the his- tory of Penn State women's basketball, making the Lady Lion program one of only 20 in Division I to have reached that milestone. Said Kieger of her play- ers, "I thought they did a really great job of responding to the adversity we hit against Rider." –M.H.

• Cover