Blue White Illustrated

hey are 2guring it out. They are learning on the job, and as is o5en the case in such situations, there are going to be mishaps. There's going to be some ugliness. The Penn State women's basketball team won only three of its 2rst 10 nonconference games, and the three opponents it defeated – Towson, Wagner and Rider – had gone a combined 5-21 through mid-December. Heading into their nonconference 2nale against USF, the Lady Lions were one of only two Big Ten teams with a losing record. But coming o4 a three-year run in which Penn State dominated the Big Ten regular season, coach Coquese Washington has been unfazed by her team's sluggish start. The Lady Lions had been gutted by the graduation of four starters, and the players slated to assume starting positions and critical roles o4 the bench this year were mostly freshmen and sophomores. The early-season struggles, while certainly unwelcome, were not unexpected. "Of course, you want to win every game. That's not even a question at all," Wash- ington said following Penn State's 85-51 rout of visiting Rider on Dec. 14, its most decisive victory of the season. "This team has been really good at understanding that they have a lot to learn about playing at this level. [They have to learn] how to play together with limited experience. Tonight, we had a freshman and four sophomores on the 3oor most times. So they have been really good about under- standing that we are not last year's version of Lady Lion basketball. We're not the version two years ago when there were a lot of upperclassmen and there was a lot of understanding of how di4erent teams play." The Lady Lions' primary problem so far has been a lack of o4ensive cohesion. Through 10 games, they were 13th in the Big Ten in scoring with an average of 64.9 points per game. They were also 13th in 2eld goal percentage (40.8) and free throw percentage (64.6) and were last in 3-point 2eld goal percentage (23.4) and assists (13.8 per game). None of which is all that surprising given that so many of the players the team is counting on are at the very beginning of their Penn State careers. Their leading scorer so far has been redshirt freshman WO M E N ' S BA S K E T BA L L | T GROWING SEASON Amid a dicult start, the Lady Lions see flashes of potential LOOKING TO SCORE Moore is Penn State's sec- ond-leading scor- er this season, averaging 12.2 points per game. Photo by Bill Zimmerman

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