St. Olaf

We had our first road of the year on Monday and it certainly didn't end the way he would've liked. We by lost 7 and once again got killed on second opportunities just like the Elmhurst and Augsburg game. We seem to want to use our youth as an excuse and I'm sick of hearing that. Yes, we do have nine newcomers to our team and yes, we have seven freshmen. We need to take care of business.

We started off pretty slow and never really came around in the first half. Olaf finished with 11 offensive rebounds in the half and probably scored on seven or eight of them. That's unacceptable. Carl Hipp had a tough half and missed a bunch of chippys early on. He definitely was frustrating and when we have an emphasis on getting the ball to him and he isn't scoring, that's definitely not a good thing for us. We ended up being down three at the half after playing awful.

We got back into the game with more intensity in the second half, but we still couldn't stop Mark Torell. He finished with 27 and we were supposed to focus on him early. We held the conference's second leading scorer, Alfie Jaryan, to one field goal because of the defense of Brandon Rieg and Jordan Schmidt. We need to be able to focus for longer stretches on defense and make sure their best players don't beat us.

We actually had the lead with 1:51 left in the game with the ball. We called a timeout and we going to look for the backdoor and if it wasn't there, an iso play for Ray Brown. Victor Easter, who played great in the second half, made a bad pass and the play went out of bounds. They come down, score, and get the momentum. They made their free throws down the stretch and ended up winning by seven.

It was another learning experience for our guys. We can't expect to give teams so many second opportunities (or timely opporunities for that matter) and expect to win. One thing that I noticed is that everything seems to snowball for us. If we make one bad play on offense then we make a bad play on defense, so on and so forth. We can't continue to do that and win in this conference, the guards are too good.

One thing about Nelson's teams is that we have always played well at the end of the year. Last year was a great example but we dug ourselves too big of a whole in the middle of the conference season. I told our guys that my senior year with Nelson at Brockport, we were 7-6 to start the year and then went on to win 15 straight and made it to the NCAA Tournament and the "Sweet 16." I think this team is capable of that, we certainly have enough talent. We'll see how much heart we have.

Up at Concordia-Moorhead on Saturday in our last game before break.