The Iowa women’s second game of the season feature’s a team that is in its second season of Divison-1 basketball, but it’s not a matchup that the Hawkeyes can take lightly.

North Alabama is 2-0 on the season — which includes a 128-26 victory over the Virginia University of Lynchburg — and have returned all five starters from last season.

Because of these impressive marks, the Hawkeyes are not taking their game against the Lions, which starts at 6:30 p.m. tonight at Carver-Hawkeye Arena as a granted victory.

“I tried to compare them to [Northern Iowa] for my team,” head coach Lisa Bluder said. “You know, sometimes you look at directional schools and people think, oh, they are going to be an easy W, and it’s not the case with North Alabama. You know, they won 21 games last year. Their first game last year, they went into Vandy and beat Vanderbilt.”

With all five North Alabama starters being seniors, Bluder said that group has seen everything, are used to playing together, and have an unspoken chemistry.

In the past two games, those starters have put up some remarkable statistics. Forward Brittany Panetti has gone 14-of-15 from the field and has 13 rebounds in only 38 minutes of play. Guard Ivy Wallen has 22 assists on the season while average 17 points per game.

“This is a team, again, that’s really offensively minded, and we really have to do a good job defensively,” Bluder said.

Not only do the Hawkeyes have to well defensively, but they also acknowledge they need play cleaner basketball compared to their last game, which they won 85-53 over Florida Atlantic. In that game, the Hawkeyes had 24 turnovers and 22 fouls.

This type of play is one that the team expected they would have early in the season, considering they only returned two prominent starters from last season.

“I think we need to clean everything up,” senior captain and guard Kathleen Doyle said. “It was [a] pretty sloppy first game, but we got a lot of young people getting their first experience. So, [it] kind of happens with a new offense, a younger group of people playing, so I think it’s just going to get more and more smooth, but it’s just the little things like playing solid defense without fouling and taking care of the ball.”

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Doyle herself had six turnovers in that game, though she also had 15 points.

One of the major issues that the Hawkeyes had last time out was that they couldn’t establish a tempo because there were so many fouls on both teams.

“We want to control the tempo on the offensive side of things by the way we push,” Bluder said. “But then understand that after the fast break transition is now that we want to change the tempo and our team hasn’t learned how to do that yet.”

The Hawkeyes are ready to play after a week off. They know that the more games they have, the better it is for them, especially since they have a game at Northern Iowa on Sunday.

“Hopefully [tonight we] just get a little more experience and a little more confident playing out there in front of fans,” Doyle said. “And then we’re going to take the show on the road, so it would be good to get that experience here in Carver one more time before we hit the road.”