We caught up with Jim Flanery, head coach of Creighton’s women’s basketball team to discuss the Bluejays’ recent bumps in the road and how they are progressing through the first month of the season.
White & Blue Review: How is the team after the past couple of losses? Will the experiences against those opponents [nationally ranked Notre Dame; Nebraska] help in the long run?
Jim Flanery: The Notre Dame game was such a debacle in the first half, but we knew they were a good team. After they played us they went on to beat Marquette by 53 points. They are good. With that said, it wasn’t what I had planned or hoped for at all. I did think we showed some improvement in the second half, but we got a bit shell shocked in the first half. We had such a bad start that I think we lost a lot of confidence.
Against Nebraska, I thought we played OK, but not well enough to beat a BCS school on the road. We missed a lot of easy layups, but the players and I were not too discouraged. I think we are still showing that we are a bit inconsistent because of our youth, but we will get there. This next three-game stretch will be very important for our team. They will be winnable games but they are also games we could lose. We will learn a lot in the next few games.
WBR: She is only a sophomore, but how has Sarah Nelson stepped up to be a leader for this team?
JF: She is a great vocal leader and not afraid to talk to her teammates. The captains on the team right now are more soft spoken, so she is a welcomed addition. She has been playing well, and that is a big part of it. We need to get the ball into the post more for her but it is tough because a lot of our guards come from teams that didn’t have that size on their high school teams so they are not used to that option. With that, she also needs to work on throwing it out when she gets double-teamed. She is great in practice, vocally and on the floor, but we just need to get her the ball more during the games.
WBR: How has Carli Tritz improved over the past few weeks since coming back from injury?
JF: I thought she played well against UNL. Sometimes we forget that she is only a sophomore, and taking three and a half weeks off will really slow you down even if you are a junior or senior. She still has a lot to learn, but ironically, her two best games have been at Kansas and at Nebraska. Her confidence is coming back but she needs to be a bit more consistent. I would like to see her defense improve, especially man to man. We are asking her to do a lot, and put in a lot of minutes and produce a lot of offense. Add the defense to that effort and that is a lot. We don’t really have that one person we can put on an opponent’s top offensive player.
WBR: What are some of the things the team is doing really well right now?
JF: The ball movement has improved and we are playing much better half court defense than we were. We have been working a lot on moving without the ball. That in turn allows us to move the ball better.
WBR: How are things on the injury front?
JF: Not bad. [Jasmine] Corbin has a bit of a thumb issue, and she will be in a splint for a while but it is something she can play with. Riley Norman will have surgery on Friday and that may be a career ender. She has had two ACL surgeries in 20 months, and even though this is not an ACL, she will likely be done. We will offer to still have her around the program, maybe as a student assistant, because I think she really likes Creighton and being on this campus.
WBR: With Bowling Green coming in this weekend, what kind of challenges do they give you?
JF: They are a really good team. They have won their league something like six years in a row. They have a very good coach and they play a very systematic game. They started the season off with an 0-2 start but have run off seven wins in a row. This game will be a great test for us, and I think we will learn a lot about our team.