THUNDER BAY -- They’re on a roll, but the Lakehead Thunderwolves women’s basketball team is about to face its toughest test of the season.
A week after sweeping the winless Waterloo Warriors on the road, the Wolves have invited the 9-0 Brock Badgers, the seventh-ranked team in the nation, into their Thunderdome lair.
The march to the postseason begins here, said LU coach Jon Kreiner after practice Thursday night.
“We’ve got to come out and play or they’re going to put us away pretty quick,” Kreiner said. “The whole key is to bring a physical attitude and a competitive attitude to the floor right from the very get-go.
“In the past, and I don’t want to jinx it, but we’ve played well against Brock. I think we match up somewhat OK against them, and I think we have a good game plan.”
The Thunderwolves spent much of Thursday’s practice working out ways to keep Brock forward Nicole Rosenkranz from doing too much damage. The dual threat is averaging close to 16 points a night, grabbing 8.3 rebounds in the process.
The Badgers, one of the top defensive teams in Canada, present plenty of challenges from top to bottom.
“When you go through every position, they defend their position really well,” Kreiner said. “They’ve got some good size, so they can handle the bigger teams, more so than they have in the past, when they play Rosenkranz and (Samantha) Dejong together.
“Then they’re 5-foot-10, 5-foot-10 at the two-three position and they’ve got length.”
Offensively, the two teams match up similarly. Both squads average about 65 points a night. Both sides also average about 37 rebounds a game.
Kreiner said he plans to stick with the run-and-gun offensive game plan he’s gone with all season, a strategy that has the Wolves at 5-4 and in fourth place in an OUA West division that will send six teams to the postseason.
That said, he wants his players to keep a level head on the court against a team that has taken three straight from Lakehead, LU’s last win coming Feb. 11, 2011, a 76-72 home-court triumph.
“We have to be disciplined and not try to score on the first thing that we find,” he said.
“We don’t want to change the way we play. We still want to push the tempo. We still want to attack and we still want to go at them.”
Ayse Kalkan, a 5-foot-9 guard averaging slightly more than nine points a night for Lakehead, said her teammates are excited and nervous to see where they stand against one of the best teams in the country.
But they have no plans to stand around in awe.
“It’s a big game, but we did do well previously, so we hope be in it and come out strong tomorrow,” she said.
Defence will be key, she added.
“We have to stop the post and get some steals,” she said.
Game time at the Thunderdome is 6 p.m. The men’s game will follow at 8 p.m.
