Cowgirls' home struggles continue

Richard Anderson photo
Wyoming freshman Emma Langford battles BYU's Kristen Riley on Saturday.

By Richard Anderson
Wyoming Sports.org

Once upon a time, the Wyoming Cowgirls were nearly automatic at home. That was then, this is now.

In the previous three seasons, the Cowgirls were 42-5 in the Arena-auditorium, including the WNIT.

After Saturday’s 58-45 loss to Brigham Young, the young Cowgirls are now just 4-6 in the A-A this season.

“We’ve gotten used to winning here and being comfortable playing here,” Wyoming senior post Elisabeth Dissen said. “We’re kind of having difficulties winning here this year, so it’s frustrating.”

Wyoming head coach Joe Legerski said their lack of home court advantage is frustrating for all involved -- the coaches, the players and the fans.

“We don’t play well at home and that has been a struggle because they (fans) have been used to over the last three years, seeing Wyoming win at home,” Legerski said.

Legerski has preached patience all season for the above mentioned and with such a young team, he needed every bit of that patience on Saturday against the Cougars.

While a more veteran team learns to move on after a tough play or game, Legerski admitted that this team has problems doing that. He said they have a bad habit of reacting to every possession.

“You talk to them about trying to move on and they have a difficult time moving on," he said. “There were times we drew things up on a timeout and we would go out on the floor and do something entirely different than what we drew up. That is young players not being focused at times; it is older players not being focused at times. We’ll take a day off and we’ll get back at it, but it just doesn’t get any easier.”

BYU head coach Jeff Judkins knows the feeling. His young team struggled at 13-16 last season.
“I think Joe is going through what I went through last year,” Judkins said. “He has a lot of young players. The nice ting is our team is young, too, but our players have played more minutes and are more seasoned and the Wyoming players will go through that too.”

The Cowgirls, 2-5 in the Mountain West and 10-10 overall, picked up their two league wins last week on the road against Colorado State and Air Force. Returning home for a pair against BYU and next Wednesday versus New Mexico, it was a good chance to maintain some momentum.

Maintaining momentum, game-to-game or within the game, is a battle for the Cowgirls this season. On Saturday, even after shooting just 19 percent from the field in the first half, the Cowgirls were down by just three. But BYU scored the first six points of the second half and used an 11-2 start to basically put the game away.

Even last week in the wins, the Cowgirls struggled with their momentum in the final minutes. CSU came back from 21 points down to cut the lead to one and Air Force cut a double-digit advantage to give before Wyoming responded.

“That seems to be a reoccurring theme this year for us, which isn’t good,” Wyoming senior Megan McGuffey said. “We just got caught on our heels in the second half. We were only down by three points and it felt like we could have been down a lot more. That really took the air out of us right away. We have to stop doing that and we have to start attacking more.”

It doesn’t get any easier for the Cowgirls, as New Mexico is also one of the top teams in the league.

“This is just a group that has to fight its way through it and that’s what we are trying to do now,” Legerski said.