TCU women open basketball season with win, shrugging off all manner of distractions
It felt like a minor miracle that the TCU women’s basketball team was playing a game at all on Wednesday afternoon.
So a slow start at a mostly empty Schollmaier Arena for their season opener against Incarnate Word was the least of head coach Raegan Pebley’s concerns, especially considering her team went without any preseason scrimmages and missed a bunch of practice time because of COVID-19 issues.
It was all pleasantly in the rear view mirror after the Horned Frogs dispatched the Cardinals, 84-59.
“It’s awesome to be able to be back on the floor and have uniforms on and officials out there and a scoreboard in a game that matters,” Pebley said.
It was the first game since last season’s 22-7 squad, which was anticipating its first trip to the NCAA Tournament in a decade, had its dreams dashed when the coronavirus pandemic exploded across the country in mid-March. In the months that followed, the team, like so many others across the nation, dealt with weighty issues, from national to personal to communal.
Whether it was the nation’s reckoning with racial injustices through the spring and summer, Pebley having to have brain surgery to remove a benign tumor in June or even a tornado touching down in Arlington Tuesday night, just getting back to a routine was therapeutic for all involved with the game.
But just getting to a season opener for the team amid a resurgent pandemic was an arduous task, And not just for Pebley, who serves on the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association.
“There’s a locker room of players, a training room of staff, offices filled in the Schollmaier of employees who have been working so hard for a very long time to get this season going,” she said. “These conversations leading to today having been happening since last May. That we were able to have this day is a total credit to all of the work.”
Still, Pebley said she had to wonder if the game was going to be played.
“God and I were having some conversations [Tuesday] night when that tornado was trying to come through here,” Pebley joked. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Are you really going to do this right now? Come on.’ We’re praying and thinking about the people in Arlington who went through that.”
As for her team’s performance? It was about what she’d expect for a squad that hasn’t had a normal preseason.
“We definitely played like a team that is pretty new to each other,” she said. “I have to do a good job of staying patient and continuing to help them form and gel together and build that chemistry. I thought the second half was much improved as far as effort goes on the defensive end and it became a lot easier to score once when we did that.”
Indeed, the Frogs’ defensive pressure in the second half helped turn a three-point lead into a 14-point lead after three quarters. TCU scored 33 points off of 29 turnovers.
Lauren Heard, who had 22 points, five assists and five steals, said first-game issues were to be expected, especially considering the circumstances. Yummy Morris led TCU with 26 points on 12 of 17 shooting.
“We also knew that it was going to be a learning experience about each other. You want to get the win but you also want to build that chemistry and that relationship on the team for what’s coming next,” Heard said.
A pregame devotional with her teammates helped put the opener in perspective, she said.
“The overall feeling of depletion, and honestly, sadness that everything we had worked for had come to an end [last season],” she said. “Our overall attitude was having gratitude and enjoying the moment and not thinking about anything past this moment.”
It’s a credit to the players, Pebley said, for remaining focused during a haphazard situation.
“While things around them were shifting and changing they stayed steady and consistent and stayed focused on what they could control,” she said. “It was my job to keep things simple for them. Last year, we were at a place where we could be really good at a lot. This year, right now, we need to be really good at a few things, and we’ll keep adding on to it.”
This story was originally published November 25, 2020 at 8:57 PM.
