UT Arlington interim women's basketball coach Karen Blair is using offensive techniques from her playing days at SMU, where she was a point guard from 1997-99 and led the Mustangs to three NCAA Tournament appearances.
During Thursday's 60-58 win over Idaho, in Blair's first game as interim coach, the Mavericks scored 30 points in the paint. Junior forward Desherra Nwanguma scored 20 of her career-high 27 points from within the free-throw lane."I threw in quite a few high-low plays that we had," Blair said. "Personally that's the kind of the program that I played under at SMU under Rhonda Rompola, and that's personally what I'm comfortable with."The play is designed to get a quick high- or low-post look for the inside players against a man-to-man defense."The more we can establish the inside game it's only going to continue to open up things from the outside, and we had pretty good balance of that," Blair said. "Desherra was able to score inside and hit a couple of 15-footers, and then Laila [Suleiman] contributed with 14 points."Blair will showcase more of her offense as the Mavericks host Seattle tonight at College Park Center. She said her players still have a lot of fight left in them."You've got to start somewhere," Blair said. "We finally got a 'W.' Hopefully this gives them confidence."
Seattle at UTA women
6 tonight
College Park Center
Records: UTA 5-18, 3-10 WAC; Seattle 14-9, 11-3
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