SEATTLE – Breanne Watson openly admits she struggled her first two Pacific-10 Conference games.
At Arizona and Arizona State last weekend, both losses, Watson, a true freshman from Richmond, British Columbia, found out firsthand that intensity, physicality and attitude goes up a notch once conference play starts.
“It’s a whole different level,” Watson said. “Everybody wants to win. Everybody comes out hard. And everybody wants to beat Washington.”
That learned, the trick is to wash away the sweep in the desert, the 89-74 loss to the Wildcats and the 84-81 overtime defeat to the Sun Devils.
And with a team this young, that may be a trick. Six freshmen and a sophomore dot the roster, and there’s a lot of teaching going on.
The thrust for the team’s seniors and coaching staff this week in practice is to get the young players to forget the 0-2 conference start, to realize that it’s a long season and to dwell on the past is to rob the team of preparation for tonight’s game against California and Sunday’s against No. 6 Stanford.
“We’re a young team and a lot of the girls hadn’t played in Pac-10 games,” senior guard Gioconda Mendiola said. “It’s hard to move on and think, ‘OK, now we’ve got two more big games.’ It’s hard to explain how important every Pac-10 game is. I think they’re starting to understand how hard you have to play in Pac-10 games.”
It’s not only that Washington dropped the two games, but also in the way they lost. It was hard enough to see that the Huskies didn’t come out with the energy needed to stay with Arizona. But it was even more difficult to see the ASU game largely decided on the game officials’ questionable decision to give UW go-to player Giuliana Mendiola her fifth and disqualifying foul.
“We’re trying to learn from our experiences,” Gioconda Mendiola said. “We know we were right in the Arizona State game. We should have won that game. It’s hard to grasp why we lost. But we know that if we win these two, we’ll be all right.”
The thing is, Washington’s fortunes this season depends heavily on youngsters. Watson and true freshman Cameo Hicks are in the starting lineup. Another true freshman, Maggie O’Hara is one of the first reserves off the bench.
Redshirt freshman Jill Bell is just now learning that she can be a fearsome rebounder and an effective scorer. Redshirt freshman Angie Jones, coming off her second ACL surgery, has shown solid shooting and harassing defensive ability.
So they have to play and play well. And if the seniors – the Mendiolas and center Andrea Lalum – have to lead the way, that’s what has to happen.
“The thing that we want to focus on is what we learned in our first week of the Pac-10 race,” UW coach June Daugherty said. “You can talk to them and the leaders can talk to them about how every game’s important and how physical it is, but until you’re actually in the battle, you don’t really realize what it’s like. The big thing is to learn from it and take our play up a notch.”
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