D3hoops.com Daily Dose

Holly Harvey, a junior guard for Illinois Wesleyan, checks in as her Titans get set to host Franklin in the first round of the NCAA tournament. She has lots of reasons to enjoy March and is hoping to add another big one on March 20.

I have always looked forward to the month of March. My birthday is on the 10th and what kid wouldn’t anticipate the one day a year when it’s all about them and they get showered with gifts? Now that I am older and a little more mature March holds my anticipation for a number of other reasons. Our spring break always falls the week of St. Patrick’s Day (another reason to be a fan of March) and I find myself counting down the days to it after the final week of February was filled with tests and papers. These days I also owe my love for this month to college basketball.

I log some of my longest hours of watching TV in March because I try and catch as much of the Division I NCAA tournaments as possible. It’s convenient that the opening days of the tournaments fall during spring break so I do not have to worry about whether or not I’d be able to drag myself away from the TV to go to class. Since I have been at Illinois Wesleyan the highlight of my March has been the Division III NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament.

All three of my years we have gotten the automatic bid from the CCIW. We are excited to begin our journey in the NCAA Tournament at our Shirk Center as we are a host for the first two rounds. We have Franklin College in our first game and if we are successful we will face either Simpson College or the University of Chicago. We are familiar with Chicago as we faced them at their place in December and won by 7. Just as we are starting our NCAA journey at Shirk we are hoping to end it there.

We have known for a while now that we are hosting the Final Four. It has been pretty hard to not look forward to those games and see ourselves playing for a national championship on our home court. When we find ourselves daydreaming about being in the Final Four we snap out of it and realize the games leading up to it will not just be handed to us because we are hosting. Every team we might face made the tournament for a reason and will challenge us to perform at our best.

We’ve been working hard all season for these important challenges that are about to come our way. I am confident that we are ready and have the potential to do some amazing things in the tournament. We are just going to take it one game at a time and not look past any of our opponents. Hopefully everything works out for us and March 2010 will be one of the most memorable months of my life.

Holly Harvey, a guard for the No. 1 Illinois Wesleyan Titans, has been blogging for D3hoops throughout the season. Here is her latest entry.

At a typical pre-game practice you can find our head coach, Mia Smith, wearing our next opponent’s school colors. At every game you can find our assistant coach / former player Tasha Gaston-Bell also wearing the opponent’s school colors. Some who notice may call this weird but we just call it a little bit of healthy superstition. The IWU Women’s Basketball Team is one of the most superstitious teams I have been a part of, but it is very fitting because I am probably the top contender for most superstitious player on the team. As I mentioned earlier, our superstitious ways begin at pre-game practices. Prior to practice we watch film and everyone sits in the same seat each time. Every pre-game practice I have to wear a green Nike headband the says “unstoppable”, I’ve heard a number of jokes about it but deep down I think everyone has grown quite fond of unstoppable as it’s called. We start practice with the same focus lay-up and shooting drill and end it with a walk through prep of the next opponent and team free throws. Our huddle before we leave always ends with the same cheer.

Game days produce a whole other set of superstitions. Although I own a number of IWU Women’s Basketball hoodies, I wear the same gray one every game day along with my travel green suit, the same pair of sneakers ,and of course unstoppable. I own even more Wesleyan t-shirts however there are only a select few that make the game day rotation. I also have a green and white scarf that teammate Nikki Preston’s mom made that I wear to every game. I love Orange G2 Gatorade and have to drink one before every game. When it is time for our pre-game prayer, some people will jump across the locker room to get to the person they always hold hands with. After prayer we can’t leave the locker room until we hear Coach Smith’s famous, enthusiastic “Game On, Here we go girlies, Have a day” cheer. For warm-ups we line up in the same order every game. One of our freshmen firmly believes that we play better when she misses her first left hand lay-up in warm-ups, so she has begun to intentionally miss every game. Towards the end of warm-ups our 2 seniors make a prediction about something crazy that could happen in the game, they both shoot a 3 pointer on it and if both make it they believe the prediction will come true. We stand in the same ordered line for the Star Spangled Banner (the claws really come out if someone tries to mess up that order, we take that one seriously).

What if our coaches were to forget to wear the other teams’ colors or if unstoppable were to go missing for a day? Do we think we are destined to perform poorly? The answer is no. Although we don’t stray from our superstitions we know they are nothing but routines. They put us in our comfort zone and get us game ready. They help us associate with the focus and intensity that we have brought to every game before.

It seems that our little routines have served us well this year. We are almost half way through our conference season and stand at 17-0 and hold the #1 ranking. As Coach Smith would say “It’s too late to lose now”. We had an exciting game at Elmhurst College last week. We did not shoot the 3 like we usually do and weren’t making the smartest decisions. We found ourselves down by 1 with about 8 minutes left in the second half, but we persevered and outscored them 20-9 to close the game and win by 10. I think our conference success can be attributed to our deep bench. We continually bring in fresh legs and I have noticed that we really wear our opponents down. We are committed to using our depth the rest of the way and not letting up, which I hope will make us unstoppable.

Holly Harvey, junior guard for the No. 1 Illinois Wesleyan Titans, has been blogging for D3hoops.com throughout the season. Here’s her latest report on the team’s trip to California.

Party in the U.S.A. by Miley Cyrus is my jam. If you ask any of my teammates what got them through 6 A.M. pre-season conditioning sessions I have no doubt their answers will be Holly singing Party in the USA. Naturally I was pretty pumped when I learned that our winter trip this year was to southern California because the song begins with “hopping off a plane at LAX” which is just what we would be doing. There was no time to savor the moment of hopping off the plane though because we had to run through LAX in order to make it to the car rental place before it closed. Luckily we’re in game shape and made it just in time, though I’m sure we drew some attention running with our matching green travel suits and bags.

Once we hit Hollywood and Beverley Hills the next day we blended right in with the large crowds. We walked down Hollywood Boulevard and even snagged a team picture with Captain Jack Sparrow and some of his crew from Pirates of the Caribbean. We took a tour of Kodak Theater and learned about seat fillers at big award shows. I think it’s safe to say we all took a moment to consider applying for jobs as seat fillers as we are a little star crazed. Following our day of touring we headed to the Staples Center to catch a match -up between the Clippers and the Celtics. Although there was some back and forth cheering down our row for Ray Allen of the Celtics and Chris Kaman of the Clippers, we were all really excited when the Clippers won on a buzzer beater. The following day was a more relaxed and chill day as we visited a spa. We had access to outdoor pools, hot springs, steam rooms, and our favorite, a mud bath. After a long semester, finals, and hectic holiday traveling it was just what we needed. We also got to tour one of the best wineries in California.

Along with all of our tourist activities we played two games on the west coast. We faced the University of La Verne and the University of Redlands. Although we did not seem to be on our regular game out there but we won both. Upon returning from California we finished up our non-conference schedule with a game at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. We were back on our game as we shot the ball very well and made all the rotations in our press. Junior Nikki Preston had a monster game with 25 points, she shot the lights out. We currently stand at 11-0 and I think the 87-58 victory at Whitewater was a good confidence booster heading into CCIW play this week.

We must now shift all of our focus to our conference opponents. I think we will face more challenges in conference this year but I think we are well prepared for them. I am looking forward to our second conference game against Carthage College. I think it will be a good match up and a victory could set the tone for the rest of the conference season. Our main goal right now is to go undefeated in the regular season and to host the conference tournament. I am excited with where our season journey has led us so far but even more excited for the next part of the journey into conference.

Here is the second entry from Illinois Wesleyan’s Holly Harvey. In this issue she recaps an exciting day in Bloomington and the Titans’ big victory over then-No. 1 Washington U.

Hello again, I just returned to IWU from a short but sweet Thanksgiving break at home in Chicago. I am happy that I was able put the end of the semester rush of school work aside for a few days and just enjoy my family and friends. The break was also a nice way to settle down after an exciting weekend for sports on the Wesleyan campus.

On Friday night we kicked off our Tip Off Tournament with a game against Central. We came out strong and our defense proved to be effective as we forced 39 turnovers. All 17 players saw game time and 14 made it in the scoring column. We won the game 85-60 and advanced to face #1 ranked Washington University the next day.

Saturday gave Titan fans the most opportunities to take in the excitement of IWU athletics. Our football team kicked everything off with their first round playoff game against Wabash at noon. Our Tip Off Tournament championship game against Wash U followed at 4 P.M. The Men’s Basketball team closed the day with the first game of their tournament at 8 P.M. During our shoot around before warm-ups we had one of our grade school fans running between the gym and the football field giving us updates. Finally after the exciting news of overtime and then double overtime we learned that we won. This gave us a little more fire going into our game.

Our game with Wash U had a lot of hype to go along with it because we lost to them in the Elite Eight of the NCAA Tournament last season. We drew a big crowd with a lot of our alumni there to support us. The game was close the whole way through. Our defense once again proved to be strong as we forced 31 turnovers. We needed that defense all the way to the end as Wash U hit two 3 pointers in the last minute cutting our lead to 3 each time. We shot 72 % from the free throw line for the game including some important ones at the end. We got a solid double- double from senior post Christina Solari with 16 points and 13 rebounds. The final score put us on top 58-53. A victory by our Men’s team over Johnson and Wales gave IWU 3 home wins and 0 losses for the day.

Our most recent game was against Olivet Nazarene University. It was definitely a different style of play than we are used to. They subbed a group of 5 new players every minute. It was a very fast moving up and down the court game. Unfortunately the game had a total of 83 turnovers as we had 41 of them. We didn’t take as good of care of the ball as we wanted to but we shot well and won 108-83.

We are currently 4-0 and we’ve met our first goal of winning the Tip-Off Tourney and are now focusing on our challenging non-conference games that are coming up.

Each year we invite a handful of men’s and women’s basketball players to provide us with insight on their season as it unfolds. This year we have a very interesting mix that covers a wide range of the Division III landscape. Let’s meet the first Insider who would like to finish her season right where it’s starting.

Kicking Off Titan Basketball Season

Hello fans, I am Holly Harvey and I am a junior guard on the Illinois Wesleyan Women’s Basketball Team. Wesleyan is located in Bloomington, IL just down the road from Illinois State University. There are many things about IWU that drew me to the school as a high school senior, such as its great academic reputation, nice campus, strong athletics, and overall positive atmosphere. The women’s basketball program made my college choice easy. The team dynamic was awesome, everyone got along well and I saw myself fitting right in. I stayed to play pick-up with the team and quickly learned that every player had passion for the game, a desire to win, and team mentality. I also found it easy to communicate with Coach Smith and was impressed with some of her coaching strategies that she shared.

I believe that the team characteristics I first noticed on my visit are major reasons for IWU Women’s Basketball’s recent success. Last year we finished with the impressive record of 30-1, however we didn’t reach our ultimate goals of the Final Four and a National Championship. This year is special because Illinois Wesleyan is the host of the Women’s Basketball Final Four. Nothing compares to playing at the Shirk Center in front of the home crowd. Everyone on the team is dreaming of playing in the national championship on our home court and we are working hard to fulfill that goal. However, before we look ahead to the NCAA Tournament, there are other goals that will need to be met before that.

We will be hosting The Tip Off Tournament which includes Washington University, DePauw University, and Central College. We won the tournament last year and are looking for a repeat this year. Following the tournament, we have a more challenging pre-conference schedule than previous years. We are hoping that the tougher competition will prepare us for conference play and the post season. Our goal is to repeat as the College Conference of Illinois and Wisconsin champions.

We have been working hard this pre-season to reach our season goals. Our practices have been competitive and we have been improving along the way. We had a scrimmage against Illinois Central College early in the pre-season. We saw a lot of good things at the scrimmage. Our defense looked very solid, especially our 2-3 zone. Offensively we pushed the ball up and got some good looks in transition. We also saw a number of good things from our freshman class.

We just had an exhibition game with Division I 17th ranked DePaul University. Though the outcome did not go as well as planned, as we lost 93-49, I believe it was a tremendous learning experience for the team. We watched film the very next morning and pin pointed some of our weaknesses in the game such as getting open on the wing, defensive rotations, and the transition game. We hit the floor after film and worked on those weaknesses and had a very productive practice. We all agreed that we never wanted to lose by 40 again and put the game behind us. We are now looking forward to starting the season with our first game at home against Blackburn College on November 17th at 7 P.M.