Women's basketball opens season at Ball State

The IU women’s basketball team is ready.

The Hoosiers open the season Friday at Ball State. It is the team’s first step in looking past the issues of the 2009-10 campaign.

The Hoosiers competed in two exhibition games this year that gave them a chance to identify and work out some key issues before regular season play begins.

IU coach Felisha Legette-Jack said she knows Ball State is going to be a relatively different team than she has seen in the past with the addition of two key freshmen.

“You can try to prepare for them specifically, but you don’t know what you’re trying to prepare for,” Legette-Jack said.

Instead, the Hoosiers have spent the week in practice focusing on things that the exhibition games exposed as problems — improving transition defense, sharing the ball better and rebounding.

Defensively, IU wants to be ready to defend both inside and outside with the senior-freshman combination of forward Emily Maggert and guard Jordan Huber.

“Maggert’s just an unbelievable player,” Legette-Jack said. “She’s a pristine player where everything she does just makes sense.”

If the Hoosiers do chose to double up on her, they leave Huber behind the arc, where Legette-Jack describes her as a deadeye 3-point shooter.

Legette-Jack and IU don’t plan to change their defensive strategy to try and combat the inside-outside combination. They plan to stay in their matchup zone and maintain their full court pressure.

“We don’t change what we stand for,” Legette-Jack said. “It’s not secret what you do anymore, it’s just that your players need to be more aggressive than the other team.”