Two tournaments await hungry Hawkeyes.
By Michael McCurdy
The Iowa women’s basketball team will head into Thanksgiving break with a 3-0 record and hungry for some more action. Luckily for Iowa, it will host the Hawkeye Challenge this weekend and later next week will travel to Cancún for the annual Cancún Challenge.
The Hawkeyes will play a lot of basketball in the next week, which will be a change of pace for the freshmen on the team.
With that said, Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder has got to be pleased with her team’s performance on Wednesday against North Dakota, in which the Hawkeyes snagged their first road win of the season.
Even with North Dakota’s 82 percent win ratio at home and Iowa’s lack of experience, the Hawkeyes were still able to meet the challenge and come away with the victory. Iowa was able to perform well in many areas of the game, which has Bluder excited about the rest of the season.
“This North Dakota team has an 82 percent win ratio at home, and when they tied the game at [42], we answered,” Bluder said in a release. “We kept our composure and did a good job. We got to the free-throw line a lot. Our defense was decent — North Dakota is a high-scoring team, and we held them to 31 percent shooting from the field. All in all, it was a good road victory.”
On Saturday, the Hawkeyes will welcome Massachusetts to Carver-Hawkeye in their first game in the Hawkeye Challenge. The contest will tip off at 12:30 p.m. and, because of the reputation of Atlantic 10 basketball, this one should be competitive.
The Minutewomen of Massachusetts sit at 1-1, with a win over North Dakota State and a loss against Buffalo. They’ll be athletic, and they like to get out and run, so the Hawkeye defense must be come ready to play with the same principles senior Ally Disterhoft said they had during the North Dakota win.
“We did a great job coming out from the get-go, withstanding a few runs and holding them well below their scoring average,” she said in a release. “It’s nice to see resiliency on behalf of our team.”
The Hawkeye Challenge will continue on Nov. 20, when the Hawkeyes will get the winner or loser of the Montana/South Dakota State game depending on how they fare Saturday against Massachusetts.
After the Hawkeye Challenge, Iowa gets three days off until it takes the court again, this time in Cancún, Mexico, for the annual Cancún Challenge. It will be the Hawkeyes first trip back to Cancún since they went in 2013. That year, they went 3-0 during the weekend.
Iowa hopes to have similar results this season when it opens up the tournament against UCLA on Nov. 24 at 8 p.m. On Nov. 25, the Hawkeyes will take on James Madison.
After this Thanksgiving week barrage of games, Bluder and fans will have a better understanding of where this year’s Hawkeye team stands nationally and how they will fare in the Big Ten.
Follow @MMccurd for more information on the Iowa women’s basketball team.
