Women’s Basketball | Photo by Arden Reimer | The Wright State Guardian
Students are back on campus at Wright State, but while academics have been gone, WSU’s basketball squads have been hard at work in the Horizon League. Both teams have struggled to start campaigns, but have staged comebacks in recent games to start the spring.
Discouragement and fighting back
On January 6, men’s basketball trailed by 15 points to the Detroit Mercy Titans with just under 10 minutes to play. The 1-3 in-conference Raiders were at a breaking point.
Giving into discouragement in this situation is inevitable, but men’s basketball head coach Scott Nagy’s conversations off the court with the players kept things together.
“One of the things I’ve been talking to Trey [Calvin] about … he has a tendency to get discouraged, but so do I,” Nagy said. “So, I’ve been talking to him about how, ‘our team needs you to change, but they need me to change too. Let’s do this thing together.’”
The team fought for loose balls and built momentum to take the game back, defeating the Titans 90-85 and restoring confidence in the process. After the game, senior guard Calvin talked about mentality and momentum.
“I think it’s all that together,” Calvin said. “Just making plays as a team. We have a saying, ‘brotherhood over basketball,’ so just staying together throughout the game and fighting back the whole game.”
Focus and the Process
On the women’s side, the Raiders have had a season focused on details and work, as second-year head coach Kari Hoffman needs to build a program from the ground up. As a double-digit number of players entered the program while others left the program, Hoffman has kept the focus away from outside factors.
“No matter what the story is, no matter who we’re playing, we want to really focus on us,” Hoffman said. “We talk a lot about details. We’re a details program all the way down to how you catch and pass the ball.”
The turnover has caused the Raiders to grow slowly throughout the season, losing nearly all of the games because of slow starts; but, the team’s games have gotten closer and closer, until the team got its first conference win on Friday the 13 over the Titans.
“It’s been something that we’ve talked about, of just, you’ve gotta start faster to give yourself a shot and stop playing from behind,” Hoffman said.
The team will most likely still struggle to gain wins throughout the regular season; however, with a program that turned over double-digit athletes last year, trusting the process has become the way for the program to gain some stability.
“We talked about trusting the process. What are we looking for? What are we building towards? What do we need to work on,” Hoffman said. “That’s what these early games are for, to expose where you’re weak and hopefully continue to grow and get better.”
