Southeast women set for conference play

~ the Redhawks will host Belmont in their OVC opener today

Before its first practice Friday after a short Christmas break, the Southeast Missouri State women's basketball team met in its locker room to discuss what the team's goals are for what coach Ty Margenthaler calls their "second season."

The Redhawks start their "second season" -- Ohio Valley Conference play -- at 2 p.m. today against Belmont (3-11, 0-1) at the Show Me Center.

"The biggest one, no question, is we want to make the conference tournament," Southeast coach Ty Margenthaler said of the goals. "We know that Southeast women's basketball hasn't made it in the past four years ... and that's something that's really important for our program -- to keep on taking steps, and that'd be the next step for this program to make. That's something that we really talked a lot about and quite honestly talked about how we're going to get there.

"We all kind of just talked about the focus that we need on a daily basis and consistency. Those are things that we talked a lot about, and I think they're right on. If we can have those two things throughout a two-month period hopefully the ball bounces our way and good things happen for us and we'll be where we want to be at the end of the year."

Southeast was picked to finish fifth of six teams in the OVC West preseason poll, which is voted on by conference coaches and sports information directors before the start of the season.

The Redhawks have compiled a 4-9 record this season.

"If you look at our conference at this point in nonconference, I mean, there's so many teams like us," Margenthaler said. "There's a lot of 2-9, 3-10, 4-9 teams. We're all bunched in there. We're all a lot alike. ... The exciting thing is our kids know that we're all in the same bunch. There's nobody really just out there standing out there that's going to be just dominant."

Only four of 12 conference teams have more than four wins this season. Morehead State and Eastern Kentucky have five and six wins, respectively, and Murray State and UT Martin each have seven.

Belmont (3-9) already has one OVC game under its belt -- a 68-56 loss to SIU-Edwardsville on Saturday.

The Bruins and Redhawks met in Nashville on New Year's Eve last year and Southeast lost 71-58.

"They're a team that runs," Margenthaler said. "It's a new coaching staff, so it's a lot different than we went against last year. They're going to run. Right now what we're seeing on film is they run a lot of set plays for certain players. We just kind of have to get those set plays down."

Jordyn Luffman averages 13.8 points a game for the Bruins. Molly Ernst played her first game of the season Dec. 21, scoring a team-high 21 points and hitting five 3-pointers. Ernst and Luffman each hit three 3s against SIUE.

Southeast is coming off a 77-66 loss to Missouri State on Dec. 21, but Margenthaler took some positives away from the game and felt he saw improvement from earlier in the season.

"I thought getting down early we did not really kind of fold or we didn't stop competing," Margenthaler said. "We continued to compete and actually won the second half. I was really pleased and I was proud of our kids to keep fighting. There were some games earlier in the year that getting down and missing some shots really frustrated us."

Southeast hasn't had a player score consistently this season, and that is something Margenthaler hopes can change.

Olivia Hackmann leads the Redhawks in scoring with 10.5 points a game. Kara Wright is the only other player averaging double figures with 10.2, but she didn't score against Missouri State.

Allyson Bradshaw is coming off a career-high 19 points against the Bears. She's averaging 8.1 points a game.

"We've had a lot of ups and downs this nonconference season," Margenthaler said. "What we talked a lot about today is I want to know what to expect every single day from this basketball team, and that's something I hope to continue to grow and work on. I feel like we just haven't been real consistent yet this year.

"We've had, like, Jordan Hunter will have a great game, then maybe a couple players down, or Ally Bradshaw will play really well and maybe Kara Wright not so well. I really want to see more consistency from the group and that will be the key. If we can be more consistent I think we can really have a good conference season."