COMING INTO the 2024 season, Indiana women’s basketball (2-2) was always set up for a retooling after graduating the program’s all-time leading scorer, Mackenzie Holmes.
And while the start of their campaign has had its share of hiccups through losses to Harvard at home and Butler on the road, the latest 79-66 victory over No. 24 Stanford (4-1) shows that the road to success may be shorter than some originally thought.
For head coach Teri Moren, the team’s bounce-back win is the blueprint for what they can achieve this season.
“It feels so much better than how we’ve felt the last two games,” Moren says. “I just give our kids so much credit for how they bounced back and [have] been resilient. … When you go through rough patches, you find out what you’re made of, and we found out today that we’re capable of a lot. My hope for this group is they can see themselves in this game today and know they can come out and perform like this every night.”
Indiana is coming off what is arguably the best finish in program history after reaching the Sweet Sixteen in last season’s NCAA Women’s basketball tournament, where the team fell to eventual champion South Carolina 79-75.
With the tournament exit, they saw the departure of Holmes, who averaged 19.8 points per game and 6.8 rebounds per game, along with Sara Scalia (16.3 PPG), who led the team with a nearly 43 percent shooting average from the 3-point range.
Recouping 45 percent of their scoring average from last season has proven to be a challenge early this season, with Indiana starting their campaign with an average of 68.75 PPG after four games, a drop compared to last season’s 87.25 PPG start.
Photos by Clay Maxfield
However, the emergence of senior guard Chloe Moore-McNeil, who struggled in her first three games, may be the ingredient Indiana needs to make their offense click.
“It’s just about having a more assertive mentality being a fifth year. … I just brought it on myself today,” McNeil says after her game high of 21 points against Stanford.
McNeil also noted the need for patience among a group that is continuing to find its way.
“We didn’t get the results we wanted in the past two games, but we didn’t do anything different. We just needed a few games to get our feet under ourselves and realizing this is a different team than the past years, figuring out things and learning to gel with one another,” she says.
The clearest evidence of IU coming into their own against Stanford was the Hoosiers’ ability to take care of the ball.
On Sunday, they limited their turnovers to 11—after notching 16 and 27 in recent losses to Harvard and Stanford—while shooting 47 percent from the 3-point range, another element of their game where they had yet to find success.
Photos by Clay Maxfield
Junior guard Yarden Garzon finished the day shooting 4 for 7 from distance, and it’s her ability to spread the floor that may benefit IU as they continue the season.
Garzon, who shot 42 percent from the 3-point range last season and was the team’s third-leading scorer, believes that the faith she has in her game will help her reap rewards this season.
“I feel like I’m always confident about my shot,” Garzon says. “I’ve been getting a lot of reps in practice [and doing] individual work on my own, and I know the coaches and teammates trust and believe in me, so every time I see the basket, I feel confident to shoot it.”
Moving forward, Indiana will travel to the Bahamas this weekend, where they’ll face Columbia in the Battle 4 Atlantis before hosting two non-conference matchups as a final tuneup before the start of Big Ten Conference play.
