Steven Wilson
News-Press Correspondent
It
won’t get any easier anytime soon for the 7-8 Gauchos. With two critical Big
West matches this week – the second being against the Big West conference leading
Cal State Northridge – UCSB is preparing for a long haul.
“I
think every game at this point is a critical, must-win game,” UCSB center
Kirsten Tilleman said. “We can’t overlook a single team.”
That
mindset will be key this week. They may face a much better team on Saturday,
but the Gauchos’ game tonight against the Long Beach State 49ers will be
equally, if not more, important.
“We
have to go in, number one, expecting to win, but also knowing that Long Beach
is a much better team at home,” UCSB coach Carlene Mitchell said. “I know they
just had a rough stretch on the road, but that’s been a commonplace in the Big
West right now – win at home. So, for us to have a chance to win this
conference, we have to win on the road.”
After
winning two conference games at home against UC Riverside and UC Irvine, the
49ers dropped three games in a row on the road – all to Big West opponents, but
as Mitchell pointed out, that’s been the norm. Long Beach State is just 1-9 on
the road, but 6-2 at home, while the Gauchos are 5-3 at home and just 2-5 on
the road.
“Any
team that’s playing on the road (can struggle),” Tilleman said. “You’re not in
your home environment, and you’re in a, sometimes even hostile environment, and
you really need to come together as a team and draw energy from within. That’s
something that, even at home, we’ve been struggling to do, because at home we
have the fans for (energy), but we don’t necessarily have that on the road.”
The
Gauchos have fallen behind early in many of their road games, and Tilleman says
it’s not really anything they do on offense, opposed to what they should be
doing on defense.
“It would be ideal to come out and
have a lot of offensive fire, but a lot of the momentum that we get as a team
is from the defensive end,” Tilleman said. “We want to focus on ourselves. A
lot of the games we have played have come down to how we play – it’s not about
the other uniforms, it’s about coming together as a team.”
It’s
been a routine this year – each player knows their responsibility and what they
need to do to help their team. It then comes down to execution.
“We
all know our roles and the importance of every game,” Tilleman said. “My role,
as in every game, is to do the little things and play as good of defense as
possible, and be available and a presence on offense as well.”
Tilleman’s
role this week, as well as the rest of the post players for the Gauchos, will
have a significant impact on the outcome of the game. The 49ers use a
four-guard and one power-forward lineup and they have a tendency to clear out
the middle and play one-on-one in the post.
“They’re basically playing four guards,
and that sometimes gets us in trouble,” Mitchell said. “We’ll give them
different looks and hopefully we can press a little quicker to slow up the
tempo of the game.”
The
49ers also like to switch up their defensive scheme each series, switching from
multiple zone defenses to man, to a press.
“I
don’t want that to hinder our lack of scoring ability at times,” Mitchell said.
“So that’s what we’ll focus on: identifying what defense they are in.”
The
offense and specifically the guards will need to be ready for any defense they
see. They will also have the ability to change the play if they don’t like what
they see on the court.
“They’re
throwing anything and everything at you to throw you off,” sophomore guard
Nicole Nesbit said. “So we don’t know what it’s really going to be like, but
we’re going to be ready for everything.”
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