Wolves’ women basketball reserves prove worth

If you don’t have depth, you better have Lady Luck at your side.

While the Lakehead Thunderwolves women’s basketball team won’t turn fortune away should she come calling, they’re glad they’ve got a few bodies on the bench who can step in when called upon at the last minute.

Missing starters Sarah Gordon (illness) and Georgia Harvey (lower-body injury), the Wolves (9-7) were forced to call on the reserves to chew up major minutes against Windsor last weekend. Despite losing both games, they filled in admirably, said forward Lindsay Druery, who averages 11.2 points a night, second only to Tasia McKenna on the Wolves.

"I think this weekend, our second game against Windsor showed our rookies can play at the exact same level as our vets. They really stepped up for us big on Saturday night, when Georgia sat out from injury and Sarah didn’t even travel because of illness," said Druery, on Tuesday named LU’s female basketball athlete of the month and seventh in the nation with 9.4 boards a night.

"Both those players are great shooters and have a presence on the floor and our rookies were able to show that they have such a presence, to so it was really good for our team."

On a team that has traditionally played well in preseason and carried it through the opening half, the depth, including players like rookies Corina Bruni and Ayse Kalkan, and veteran Chiaki Nakamura, should prove handy as they attempt to reverse the trend.

The Wolves are 4-4 since the break, and have all but locked up a playoff position, 10 points up on seventh-place Waterloo with just six games to go.

But Druery said the team does not want complacency to rule before the postseason kicks in three weeks from now.

"We’re kind of showing that we’re proving everyone wrong by that this year. We are playing probably our best basketball right now. Our biggest concern is finishing the season off playing at our highest level. We tend to play to the level of our competition, so if we’re playing a great team, we step it up. But weaker teams we tend to fall back a little bit and be complacent," she said.

It’s a dangerous habit to get into and one they’re working to correct, Druery added.

"I think we figured ourselves out in the second half of our game against Guelph, and hopefully from there we can carry our high level through," she said.

It starts this weekend, said coach Jon Kreiner, whose team faces a 4-12 Waterloo squad, a team averaging just 55 points a night, 14 less than the Wolves. Waterloo has won just three of its past seven outings and should be ripe for the picking for a team looking to end a two-game slide of its own.

"Nothing less than two wins will be where we want to be at. And then we’ve got a battle," said Kreiner, already looking to a mid-month confrontation on the road against third-place Brock and the season finale against second-place Western.