Utah State defense improves against Haskell

By Ashley Springer

Defense was key going into Friday's game. 

The Utah State University women’s basketball team knew it and did it as the USU Aggies won 90-63 against Haskell Indian Nations University, the Aggies second non-Division I opponent, on Friday night.

The Aggies held Haskell to just 35 points during the first three quarters of the game with Haskell only scoring eight points during the third.

“One of our main focuses was our defense,” said USU sophomore guard Funda Nakkasoglu. “We look towards that when conference time comes because we’re a transition team and that really allows us to transition the ball.”

The Aggies had 20 fast-break points on the night compared to Haskell’s zero and had 28 points off of Haskell’s 22 turnovers.

“We need to keep the energy on defense… because it makes it so much easier on offense for us,” Nakkasoglu said.

According to USU head coach Jerry Finkbeiner, one of the areas the Aggies struggled during Tuesday’s game against the University of Northern Colorado was defending the off-the-ball cutter.

Against Haskell, the Aggies got into the passing lane to disrupt passes by either by deflecting the ball or getting the steal. The Aggies had 17 steals on the night, 16 of which came during the first three quarters.

“We’re stepping off a bit more and kind of putting our numbers to the ball so they don’t look to drive as much, and when they cut, jump to the ball and do all the fundamental things to minimize them cutting over us and getting easy baskets from their cuts,” Nakkasoglu said.

“We’re trying to get the ‘A-word’ involved in our game: aggressiveness,” Finkbeiner said. “Both going to the hoop offensively and then looking for steals. That spread zone… we call ‘The Twilight Zone,’ we want to go for steals, we want to go for deflections. It’s a high-risk, high-reward and we’re trying to sell that to the girls. And tonight was the first time I’ve seen our ‘Twilight Zone’ begin to kind of look like it’s supposed to look, you know, go for those long passes, get the hands on the basketball and create some deflections, create some steals.”

Freshman guard Rachel Brewster is the defensive captain for the Aggies.

“We’ve spoken a lot with the team about talking... so that was a big thing tonight,” Brewster said. "And I think what’s good tonight we were able to... be more aggressive. And we got to see what happens when we do get up and get the steals, so hopefully we can transfer that to our other games.”

The Aggies also recorded six blocks on the night behind senior forward Tijana Djukic’s three.

“I think it was better,” Nakkasoglu said about the defense. “There’s still a lot of room for improvement… We have to bring this energy and we have to bring this execution of our defense every single game. We can’t be too happy with this; we just need to keep going up from here.”

The Aggies hope to use this experience when facing future Division I opponents.

“We just look at what we did well and have to go if we keep doing that and we keep building on that when we move into the next games, then it’ll work out,” Brewster said.