Ball State Women’s Basketball can’t find its groove in season opener

An ice cold start for Ball State (0-1, 0-0 MAC) leads to a dominating victory for Purdue (1-0, 0-0 BIG 10) on Wednesday, 80-38. 

The Cardinals came out the gate in the first quarter shooting 2 of 14 from the field and couldn’t  find a consistent rhythm on the offensive end. 

“It just falls completely on me,” head coach Brady Sallee said. “I have to have the team ready to play and I didn’t… I have to have us better offensively and more ready to execute.”

The Cardinals showed a little bit of life at the beginning of the second quarter starting off on a 7-2 run, knocking down about 40 percent of their shots to cut the Boilermaker lead to 19-13. However, Purdue answered and pushed the lead to 38-20 by the end of the first half.

“We will keep working and get them there,” Sallee said. “I don’t think it was for a lack of effort, which is their job. We just have to go back to the drawing board a little bit.”

The Cardinals came out of the break only making two total shots and finished the game shooting just 31.3 percent from the field and 1 of 14 from behind the arc. Ball State was also held to scoring in the single-digits in the first and third quarter.  

“There’s things for us to work on, but we’ll go back tomorrow and we’ll get after it and see in the film room what we need to do better,” senior guard Jasmin Samz said. “It’s about doing all the little things that we know we can do.”

There were only two scorers in double figures for Ball State. Senior forward Nakeya Penny led the Cardinals offensively off the bench with 13 points on 5 of 11 shots.  Sophomore Oshylnn Brown added 11, scoring seven in the fourth quarter. 

Purdue forced the younger Cardinal team to make a lot of mistakes throughout the game, and Ball State ended up turning the ball over 22 times, which led to 19 Boilermaker points. 

“We just have to learn from it and fall in love with the process,” Sallee said. 

Contact Daric Clemens with any comments at diclemens@bsu.edu or on Twitter @DClemens 

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