WACO, Tx. — The Cardinal women’s basketball have touched down in Waco and have started their pregame preparation for the five-seed Ole Miss Rebels.
For the first time since Feb. 8, the Ball State Cardinals will come in as the underdogs, but Senior guard Ally Becki knows this isn’t anything the squad hasn’t seen before.
“We've played teams like this, especially previous years for me, we played UConn and played all these big schools. That's also helped a lot, and we've just got to play our basketball,” Becky said.
With the 41st strongest non conference strength of schedule in the country, Becki and the Cardinals are battle tested, which is the preparation head coach Brady Sallee knows the Cinderella Hopefuls need to make sure this game is the same as the others.
“I think part of it, too, is our non-conference schedule, the way we prepared ourselves,” Sallee said. “You go play in the battle for Atlantis, and it's easy to get caught up in where you are and where you're playing and all this stuff, but when the ball goes up, you've got a job to do.”
The game won’t be easy for the Cardinals though. The Rebels average win by an average of 17.5 points every game while out rebounding their opponents by 7.3 rebounds per game. With 11.5 steals per game and 4.5 blocks per game, Sallee knows he has a tough matchup on his hands.
“You know, I see a team that plays hard. They're going to get up and try to make every bounce, every pass, everything you do extremely hard,” Sallee explained.
The Cards may be underdogs, but Sallee and the cards won’t stop believing in themselves.
“I think we believe, first of all. And I think we understand we're battle tested with who we've played. We played one of the top 50 non-conference schedules in the country, so we've been there, we've done it, but respect the heck out of them and know that they're good.”
For Ally Becki, there was one goal to start the season.”
“We all knew what the end goal was, and we're here to win, and we brought in a bunch of people that want to win and people that did stay here.”
The Cinderella hopeful Cardinals will face off against the Rebels in a 12 seed vs 5 seed faceoff in Foster Pavilion at 6 p.m. Eastern Time.
Contact Max Robson with comments at maxwell.robson@bsu.edu.
