You don't need a statistician to tell you that so far this season, the combination of Wednesday night games and the UB women's basketball team have mixed like oil and water.
The Bulls are 1-5 when they play on Wednesdays this season, a trend Buffalo hopes to reverse tonight when the Bulls host Kent State.
"I'm not concerned about what days of the week we're playing," said UB head coach Cheryl Dozier. "We're not playing well, I mean we obviously haven't won many games lately, since the Akron victory."
Since beating Akron, the Bulls (4-18 overall, 2-9 Mid-American Conference) have lost three straight games. They have lost eight of their last nine. They have won only three games so far in 2005, and they will face a hot team in the Flashes (14-8 overall, 7-4 MAC) who are coming off a victory against Northern Illinois.
"We just have to come out and match Kent State's intensity because they're going to come out with a tremendous amount of intensity," said Dozier.
The key to the game for the Bulls will be a combination of defensive stops, bench contributions and freshman forward Heather Turner making a notable contribution.
"We spent a lot of time trying to feed the post and getting our kids to understand that good things happen for us when the ball goes inside and then comes back out," said Dozier.
The Bulls have seen nearly no contribution coming from their bench players for the most part of this year, and that has been a key factor in the team's inability to consistently win games.
"For the last about month and a half I've been talking about bench play and bench production," said Dozier. "And we haven't been able to get it."
Because of the lack of production from the backups, UB's starting five is forced to play much more than what was expected of them, and though they have shown that they are willing to step up to the challenge, it has proven to be too much of a challenge for them at times.
"We've had great spurts, at Eastern Michigan last week, with about 10 minutes to go, the game's 41-41. We just don't have a good last 10 minutes," said Dozier.
On the defensive side of the ball, their opponents have exploited the Bulls' weaknesses.
"We're young, and at times we struggle with taking care of the basketball, we struggle with the mentality that it takes on the defensive end of the court to get stops," said Dozier.
The Bulls cannot struggle for too long against Kent State, as the Golden Flashes have a formidable 3-point presence in Melissa DeGrate, who hit six 3-pointers in one game earlier this season.
Buffalo has been struggling greatly this season, and although the future looks bright for this squad, nobody likes what they are going through right now.
"Nobody likes to lose, not even the coaching staff. We just have to focus with this young group, and just continue trying to get better," said Dozier.
The Bulls' current losing streak, and overall poor record has nothing to do with any kind of lack in senior leadership, or a drop in overall leadership from last year to this year, according to Dozier.
"It's not a lack of senior leadership. I think that Talia Merlino and Allison Bennett have been two great seniors in our program, they really have," said Dozier. "I know statistically people look at it and say they're not producing, but as far as kids who come into a program and buy into a program and bleed blue and white, I can't ask for two other people than the seniors I have in Talia and Allison."
Buffalo will hope that the guidance of Bennett and Merlino will show the team's young players how to get out of a slide like the one in which the Bulls currently find themselves.
A big problem that UB has been facing this year is the inexperience of all of its new players. Dozier has had to find a happy medium between game-planning for a specific team, and just getting her players the proper practice experience that they need.
"I think we've tried to do a balance of that, we know we need to get them better, but we also need to plan for every game," said Dozier.
Tip off against Kent State is slated for 7 p.m. tonight at Alumni Arena.
Photo: Courtesy of Matthew Messina, from the RMBERS' Instagram page
