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.