Women's basketball

The most quickly accelerating team on campus might be Jodi Kest's squad.

Sure, Akron (1-5) lost 74-55 to Pittsburgh (7-0) tonight, but the attitude is right. Kest said the team is much, much better than it was three weeks ago.

The first-year coach also said Pitt is a team Akron aspires to be.

Solid young post players like Niki McCoy and Riana Miller are how the Zips will get there. Both scored in double figures tonight. I imagine Miller will replace Mandy Holzer in the starting lineup soon.

Yeah, I'm optimistic about this team's prospects in the next few years. I'm quite concerned about the fan support, however. Only 223 fans showed up to see Akron's biggest out-of-conference home game in a while.

Just like the volleyball and women's soccer teams, we'll see if the improvement is for real once the MAC schedule begins on Jan. 3. The Zips will invite Lehigh to Rhodes Arena for another one of those awesome Sunday 2 p.m. start times.

Men's basketball

In addition to what I wrote about Oral Roberts, the Buchtelite's Michael Beaven points out the Golden Eagles play a strict man-to-man defense.

Because of it, coach Keith Dambrot says Akron must watch its turnover count closely.

It appears Dambrot will play Oral Roberts straight up on defense, rather than double teaming Caleb Green, like Kansas did. When the Jayhawks did that, Green still filled up the stats, and so did his teammates.

In the Buchtelite article, Dambrot said it will be important for Chris McKnight and Jimmy Conyers to have big games on Saturday. Overall, the coach seemed fairly confident the Zips can win.

• You have probably caught some of these ACC/Big 10 Challenge games. The Outsiders debated which conference the MAC should play if it made such a partnership. They agreed, however, they want Kent State to be a sacrificial lamb.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Women's Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.