Queen Bees look to reverse postseason trend
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By Eric Page | Thursday, February 28, 2008 |
It’s tournament time again for the St. Ambrose women’s basketball team.
And, in recent years anyway, that hasn’t been a good thing.
The Queen Bees have long dominated the Midwest Collegiate Conference, winning 70 percent of their games the past seven seasons. But the program hasn’t won an NAIA Tournament game since reaching the Elite Eight in 2000.
That’s something first-year coach Nate Altenhofen hopes to change, starting tonight when the Bees’ postseason begins with a 7 p.m. MCC quarterfinal matchup with Ashford.
“I’ve been trying to (get the team in postseason mode) the past few weeks,” Altenhofen said. “We’d been in kind of a lull and almost pleased where we were at and not knowing we need to keep making strides this time of year.
“You try to create some slightly tougher or uncomfortable practice situations that challenge you a little bit more, and hopefully that carries over into some toughness in the postseason.”
Ambrose rolled through the regular season, riding an explosive offense and an increasingly stingy defense to a 25-5 record, including a 14-2 mark in MCC play that was good enough to win the league title outright.
But leading scorer Jenny Clark has struggled to find her touch the past month after missing time with a stress fracture in her foot, and 3-point specialist Casey Breitbach is recovering from a kidney infection.
Clark still wears a stabilizing boot when she’s not on the court, and she closed the regular season with a 1-for-16 shooting performance — 0-for-12 from 3-point range — in a loss Saturday at Grand View.
That snapped the Bees’ 11-game win streak.
“As poorly as we played offensively in the second half, I thought it was probably one of our best defensive games of the season,” Altenhofen said. “That’s what we want at this time of the year. You want to be able to win a game both ways — offensively and defensively. We’re proving we can do both.”
The Bees have done both, ranking 11th in the nation in scoring offense (78.5) and eighth in scoring defense (55.6).
Ambrose can earn an automatic berth into the NAIA field with a conference tournament championship, but Altenhofen said he expects the Bees to receive an at-large berth regardless of what they do this weekend.
Eric Page can be contacted at (563) 383-2277 or epage@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.
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