UW hoping for a better Saturday

Published 12:28 pm Saturday, January 31, 2009

Two days since the Washington men’s and women’s teams lost to Arizona and the football program had to self-report another recruiting violation, the Huskies are hoping today turns out better than Thursday.

The UW women are off to a good start here agaisnt ASU, jumping out to a surprising 15-10 lead against the Sun Devils. It’ll be a big challenge for the Huskies to maintain this kind of play against one of the Pac-10’s best teams, but if they could, this would be one heck of a way to end a program-worst seven-game losing streak.

The men tip off in Tempe at 2:30 looking to bounce back from a loss in which they gave up 106 points to Arizona.

In a phone interview friday, senior Justin Dentmon—who was featured in today’s Herald, by the way—said he thinks the team will bounce back well from just its second loss is 15 games.

“I think are team is responding great,” he said. “We’re just thinking, they won, let them enjoy their victory, but it’s going to take way more than that to rip our hearts out.”

As for the performance of the Huskies, Dentmon said, “We just came out lackadaisical.”

Romar agreed that something was missing Thursday.

“I thought this was the one game in probably about two months where we just didn’t play with the focus and intensity that we needed to win the game,” he said. “Bottom line, we left guys that could really shoot it open, we couldn’t contain wise. Whatever could go wrong went wrong in the second half.

Romar didn’t seem too concerned about a one game lapse, however, saying, “You go two months, it’s going to happen sooner or later. “

Romar also pointed out the Huskies responded well to their last loss, sweeping a road series in Oregon.

“No one wants to lose, but when we lost a heartbreaker at home against Cal, our team bounced back,” he said. “We’re doing OK.”

One thing that is a bit concerning, Romar said, is how often the Huskies have gotten off to slow starts in confernce play. The Huskies trailed UCLA 9-1 and came back to win, and trailed ASU 9-2 early.

“We’ve been fortunate to win some of these games, but it happened against Oregon State, it happened against Washington State, there have been some games where we’ve started off slow,” he said. “Early on sometimes our shot selection is not the best.”