After a long week of practice, the Ball State University field hockey team hopes its struggles from the non-conference season are left in the past.
The Cardinals will travel to Springfield, Mo., to open the Mid-American Conference season against Missouri State University on Sunday.
It's been a week since the Cardinals' last game, a 2-0 home loss to Indiana University, and assistant coach Liz Sanders said the team has put the time to good use. Sanders said she hopes the string of quality practices translates into better performance on the field.
"It's a long week," Sanders said. "It's a long time to just basically practice and work on schoolwork. I think the girls really use the time we spend out here as a relief and a time to focus in on getting better at fairly specific skills and different aspects of the game."
The team enters MAC play with a 1-7 record and a six-game losing streak. During the losing streak, Ball State has been outshot 101-37 and outscored 24-6. The Cardinals are working to fix an offense that hasn't scored a goal in the last two games.
"We've been working all week on building the attack," freshman midfielder Caitlin Maguire said. "We've had it all along in us. We've used it against different teams. It's there, we're going to start capitalizing on it now."
Missouri State has had a better season than most anticipated, jumping out to a 5-3 mark after being picked to finish last in the conference. The Bears will begin their MAC season Saturday against Miami University before playing Ball State on Sunday.
The two teams have played common opponents two times this year. Missouri State beat St. Louis University twice and lost to Indiana University. Ball State lost to both St. Louis and Indiana at home.
"They're going to be a much stronger Missouri team than we've seen in the past," Sanders said. "So we need to be prepared for a battle."
Missouri State's junior forward Melissa Lantz leads the MAC with 20 points, four assists and 51 shots. She also leads the team with eight goals, which ranks second in the conference. Senior forward Alyssa Hile ranks third in the league in points and goals.
"They've got really fast forwards, and they cause a whole lot of chaos," Sanders said. "We know they've been fairly successful at scoring goals in the majority of the games they've played already."
Sanders said she remains confident Ball State can turn around its play as it enters the most important part of the season.
"I think that we're still working through the new system," Sanders said. "I think we're making pretty big improvements with that. Recognizing that our players need to interchange more and we need to start playing more as 11 attackers and then 11 defenders."
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