Lisa Bluder not playing it one game at a time heading into Monday’s season opener against Southern University
By Susan Harman
IOWA CITY, Iowa – Iowa women’s coach Lisa Bluder may get a notice in the mail from the WBCA because of the sacrilege she admitted to on Thursday. Bluder confessed that in trying to fill the 10 days between Iowa’s exhibition game and Monday night’s season-opener, she was not playing it one game at a time.
The well-worn cliché is often invoked to try to hermetically seal players in a time lock so they don’t look ahead on the schedule.
“We are not going to go through our scouts for (Southern University) until Saturday,” she said. “We’ll have Saturday and Sunday to prepare for them. What I’ve done this week is kind of taken each day and prepared for a future opponent. Just because we have so long between exhibition and the first game.
“So one day we are working on Drake; one day we’re working on Belmont; one day we’re working on Kansas State. We’re not going to have as much time to prepare for all of our next opponents, so I want to have things in their minds for those opponents. And Saturday and Sunday we’re going to really, really focus on Southern.”
This week Iowa plays Monday (Southern), Thursday (Evansville) and Sunday (at Drake). Then Thursday Nov. 17 is road trip to K-State followed by a Sunday home game against Belmont, picked to win the Missouri Valley in its first year in the league. That next week is Iowa’s big Thanksgiving trip to Oregon to face Oregon State and then either Connecticut or Duke.
This is a challenging schedule and when December arrives so do North Carolina State and Iowa State. So there is method to Bluder’s madness. It’s all about using the time you have as efficiently as possible and cliches be damned.
“I think that they would get bored if I spent eight days working on Southern,” Bluder said. “I used to not tell them that we were working on future opponents, but that’s silly because it gives you more energy, more motivation when you think, ‘Today we are working on Team X and how are we going to beat Team X.’ It makes it more fun, and I think it brings a little more energy to practice.”
Iowa defeated both Southern (87-67) and Evansville (93-56) last season. Neither team had a winning record.
Iowa is fresh off an 108-29 exhibition victory that showcased newcomers and players returning from injury.
Coaches are still figuring out the post rotation behind stalwart Monika Czinano. Bluder said practice evaluation can change day to day. Associate head coach Jan Jensen said at media day that the team might not end up with a specific back-up to Czinano but instead use a “post by committee” approach.
“It also depends on the opponent,” Bluder said.
She is bullish on 6-foot-2 mobile freshman Hannah Stuelke and thinks it’s well within reason for her to play 20 minutes a game.
“I think you have to have your best players on the floor, and I think she’s one of our best six, seven players,” Bluder said. “I think she’s that good, and she’s going to get better. Freshmen are inconsistent, and that’s the think you can’t bank on with freshmen. You have good days and bad days in practice. She has been pretty highly consistent for the most part.
“She’ll back up at the four and have opportunities at the five.”
Iowa has also started to install a new zone offense and some new defensive strategies because once the season begins time has to be spent on opponent preparation.
“Once we get into the season we will take it one game at a time,” Bluder said. “But in this preseason we’re trying to get better. How do we get better? By working on what Kansas State is going to do because that’s going to make us better for Southern as well as Kansas State.”
So maybe the WBCA will just put her on probation.