By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — When West Virginia journeyed into Connecticut to face the nation’s top women’s basketball team, the game became a tale of two halves.
The Mountaineers played a competitive first half against a team that was looking for its 61st consecutive victory – all by double digits – and trailed by only eight at the intermission.
The second half was something of a disaster, the Huskies turning on the juice and pounding the Mountaineers to finally win by 33 points, 80-47.
So when the Mountaineers sat down to watch video of the game, which half do you suppose Coach Mike Carey showed his team?
Here’s a hint – it wasn’t the first half when they played well.
If they were going to get ready for the rest of season, which begins at 2:30 p.m. today when they travel to Providence, R.I., to take on the Friars, they need to improve on what they did wrong and not enjoy watching what they did right.
See, Connecticut outscored the Mountaineers by 25 points in that second half and somehow Carey found encouragement in that.
“I was happy because it wasn’t because of what they did to us but it was because of what we did to ourselves,” Carey said.
The point was, Connecticut wasn’t 25 points better than WVU at its best, but WVU just had played terribly during that span.
“Watching that I understood why it ended the way it did,” Carey said.
Now for the good news.
“What we did wrong was correctable,” Carey said.
And that was why he had his team staring at their mistakes.
“Some of the things we did were unbelievable,” Carey said. “I told the girls we could have played anyone and we’d of struggled.”
So, Carey spent his film session correcting mistakes, in part to get ready for facing Providence and in part because the day may come in the Big East Tournament when they face UConn and they will know the errors of their ways.
“We were messing up simple things,” Carey said. “Things we don’t normally do.”
Considering that West Virginia is ranked No. 8 in one poll and No. 11 in the other, it shows two things. The first is that there is a tremendous gap between UConn and the rest of the college basketball world and the second is that WVU may be closing the gap.
Providence is an improved team, even though the Mountaineers have beaten the Friars the last four times they have played, possessing a 13-9 record with 4-5 in the conference. WVU is 20-3 after the Connecticut loss.
The game could prove to be a milestone game for WVU’s Liz Repella, who needs 14 points to reach 1,000 for her career. Considering her average is 14.3 entering the game, the WVU junior figures to get it.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
