Southeast Missouri State women's basketball team seeks second win against Billikens

The Southeast Missouri State women's basketball team gets a chance to redeem itself after a rough loss to Missouri.

The Redhawks also are trying to redeem themselves against a team they struggled against last year.

Southeast (1-1) is hitting the reset button after a 46-point loss to Mizzou and will face Saint Louis University, which won 52-34 a year ago, at 6:30 p.m. today at the Show Me Center.

"To be honest, that was such a miserable game. We just played awful that ball game. It's just one where we had zero intensity and it was just a very frustrating 40 minutes of basketball, so I really haven't brought it up a whole lot." Southeast coach Ty Margenthaler said about last year's loss to SLU. "I've brought it up a little bit and every time I do, the returners know [what that was like], so I don't think I need to elaborate anymore on SLU. We're moving on. They're a different team with some new recruits and we are as well, so we're just glad to be home and really I think we're excited about showing them that we're much better than we showed them last year."

The Redhawks scored just nine points in the first half of their meeting with the Billikens a year ago. Southeast's top scorers for the game were junior guard Olivia Hackmann and senior guard Allyson Bradshaw with seven points apiece.

Desirae Ball led the Billikens with 15 points, while Erin Nelson scored nine in the last meeting.

Margenthaler said Nelson, a sophomore who's averaging 8.5 ppg, will be a key player for SLU again this year, and they'll need to limit her touches on the ball.

Junior forward Denisha Womack leads SLU (1-1) with 15.0 points and 8.5 rebounds per game.

"She's very athletic, can score inside and out, so she'll be a tough test for us," Margenthaler said.

"We'll look to maybe double once in awhile," Margenthaler added. "We have a couple ideas to keep the ball out of her hands, crowding the lane a little bit more, so there's definitely things yesterday and today that we'll continue to work on. Our ball pressure has got to be pretty strong, so it's not such an easy look inside."

Ball is averaging 5 ppg as a redshirt senior.

The Billikens offense is run by freshman Jackie Kemph, who's averaging 11 points and 8.5 assists in her first two games.

"They have a really nice freshman point guard that is doing a great job of distributing the basketball," Margenthaler said. "She gets into the paint, she pushes their team in transition, so we've got to pick her up right away."

Margenthaler was pleased with how positively his team responded at the first practice after the loss at Mizzou.

The team watched about 10 minutes of video from that game to learn from it and move on.

"The biggest thing that we did against them that we've got to continue to grow at is just our execution. We just didn't execute real well," Margenthaler said. "There's times throughout there where one or two players were running a set and they were doing something else or they got a little confused. We definitely have to do a better job on both ends of just executing. And again, Missouri's a good basketball team, but I felt like if we would've executed better, we would have given ourselves a better opportunity to maybe be in the ballgame."