One day after the ball dropped to ring in the New Year, Ball State women’s basketball (10-4, 2-1 MAC) celebrated by kicking off the Mid-American Conference season.
At 58th in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s RPI rankings, the Cardinals are the second-highest ranked team in the MAC behind only 47th-ranked Ohio University (11-3, 3-0 MAC).
Head coach Brady Sallee said interior play will be one of the team's biggest advantages in conference play.
“It’s what I want us to look like,” he said. “I want us to be that team and make teams worry so much about what they have to do in the paint to keep us from dominating, that now, all of the sudden, my shooters are just out there playing horse.”
After the Cardinals outscored Miami University (7-7, 1-2 MAC) 34-16 in the paint in Jan. 9’s 66-41 victory at Worthen Arena, Sallee couldn’t resist one of his trademark wisecracks, this one aimed at 6-foot-two-inch senior guard Nathalie Fontaine.
“I’ve built the team to be bigger and, with the exception of Nathalie, stronger,” he joked, as Fontaine unsuccessfully tried to hide her laugh. “She wasn’t ready for that one was she?”
Opponents, however, are more likely to cry than laugh – Fontaine is 10th in the nation and first in the MAC with 22.3 points per game and her 9.8 rebounds per game put her second in the MAC and 37th overall.
Fontaine is also Ball State’s third all-time leading scorer with 1,818 career points, set a new single-game record with 43 points scored in a 73-53 win at the University of Evansville on Dec. 21 and has the sixth most career rebounds in Cardinal history.
Miami held Fontaine to just 16 points and 5 rebounds, but the Stockholm, Sweden, native said the Cardinals have enough depth that she does not need to carry them.
“All of us can play basketball,” she said. “You can’t just not guard someone, and I think they were trying to focus on some people more in the beginning and then you see [junior center Renee Bennett] stepping up. You know, it takes the load off of other people’s shoulders that we have so many players that can actually score and do what we need to do to win games.”
Listed at six-feet-five-inches tall – the tallest player in the MAC – Bennett scored 16 points against Miami and was a perfect 8-for-8 from the field. She averages 8.3 points per game and 61.3 percent shooting. Sallee said she would create mismatches for the Cardinals.
As a whole, Ball State is fourth in the MAC with 71.4 points per game but boasts the league’s best field-goal (43.6 percent) and free-throw (76.4 percent) percentages.
Sallee, however, said he focuses more on the other end of the floor.
“I’m a defensive guy,” he said. “I like my teams to really defend. Now it’s nice when you can score 75 a night, but boy when you can defend every single night, you’re gonna have a chance to win every single night.”
Sallee’s emphasis on defense and playing in the paint shows – the Cardinals have the largest rebounding margin in the MAC (+6.5 rebounds per game) and their 9.7 point per game scoring margin is the second largest in the league.
Ball State’s strong non-conference schedule, said Sallee, will help continue these trends as MAC play continues.
“You gain confidence playing a good schedule and winning,” he said. “And at the end of the day, we’ve lost four games to four good teams, I think every team we’ve lost to is in the top 70 in the RPI. We don’t have a bad loss so we’ve done well in the tough schedule we play, and we have confidence.”
Sallee was nearly correct. Three of those four teams – no.19 Purdue (13-2, 4-0 Big Ten), no. 21 Florida (14-2, 2-1 SEC), and no. 47 Ohio (11-3, 3-0 MAC) are ranked inside the top 50 in the RPI rankings. The other team, no. 78 Charlotte (9-5, 2-1 Conference USA), is barely outside the top 70. All four were road losses, and the Cardinals’ lone victory against a team inside the top 70 came on Nov. 19 against Western Kentucky (11-2 MAC, 3-0 Conference USA) in Worthen Arena.
Still, the MAC features some tough opponents, including Ohio and Eastern Michigan (11-3, 2-1 MAC).
Ohio, the defending conference champion, was picked as the runaway favorite with 10 first-place votes and Jan. 6, they defeated the Cardinals in Athens, Ohio, 70-43. The Cardinals will look for revenge Jan. 30 when the Bobcats travel to Worthen Arena.
Eastern Michigan knocked the Cardinals out of the MAC
Tournament in the semi-finals last season and this season was picked to win the
MAC West despite receiving fewer first-place votes (4) in the MAC Coaches’ Poll
than Ball State (8).
It’s worth noting, however, that Sallee said the poll was “about as useful as
wet toilet paper,” when it was originally released. The two teams will look to
settle the controversy Jan. 20 at Worthen Arena and then once
again Feb. 27 in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
The Cardinals next home game will be against Buffalo (10-4, 2-1 MAC) at Worthen Arena on Jan. 13 at 7 p.m.
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