In the Sweet 16 of the Women’s National Invitation Tournament, every team is talented.
Including Ball State women’s basketball’s next opponent, Kansas State, tonight at 8 p.m.
Kansas State is led by the second-leading scorer in the Big 12, senior guard Brittany Chambers. Chambers averaged 22.1 points per game throughout the season, second in her conference to only probable Naismith College Player of the Year Brittany Griner.
Ball State junior point guard Brandy Woody will be tasked with guarding Chambers throughout the evening. While it looks like a difficult challenge on paper, Woody has shown that she can defend some of the best guards not only of the Mid-American Conference this season, but of the country.
In the first and second rounds of the WNIT, Brandy Woody defended Minnesota’s Rachel Banham and Northern Iowa’s Jacqui Kalin.
Branham finished the season 13th in the country in points per game. Kalin wasn’t far behind her at 25.
Ball State coach Brady Sallee believes that Chambers could be the best of the three, and the numbers back it up. She sits at No. 12 in the country in points per game.
It’s kind of bizarre to have these three right in a row the way it’s worked out,” Sallee said. “I don’t know if I’ve ever run across this before. It’s a challenge.”
Banham and Kalin came into their respective games averaging 40.2 total points per game.
Woody held them to 25 total points.
Ball State coach Brady Sallee confirmed that Woody will be guarding Chambers throughout tonight’s game.
“We’re gonna put [Woody] on her,” Sallee said. “That’s the easy part of the gameplan. ... I like my chances with Brandy guarding her. That’s for sure.”
Sallee called Chambers a “really dominant scorer.”
However, Chambers isn’t the only thing that Ball State has to account for in tonight’s game.
“They really hunt for 3-point shots,” Sallee said. “Which is something a little bit different. They’re really, really trying to get up as many threes as they can.”
Kansas State has made 302 3-point shots this season, good for fourth in the country.
However, it the makes seem to come from volume shooting; Kansas State has attempted a conference-high 987 3-pointers this season, over 200 more than the next-highest team in the Big 12.
It has made 30.6 percent of its 3-pointers this season, which is just 142nd in the country.
“We’re a team that clearly is built on keeping it out of the post,” Sallee said. “We’re going to have to play a little bit differently with this gameplan tomorrow since they do hunt the three so much.”
Sallee said that it’s not his team’s goal to give up zero 3-point shot attempts to Kansas State, but to contest the ones they do give up.
“If it’s 3-point shots that are guarded, we can live with it,” he said. “The ones we have to defend are the ones where they’re wide open. They do a great job of getting those shots.”
