ND-fan

It’s just not the Bison but look at size of SDSU,ORU , and KC and when we played both of Montana schools we had hard time matching up with them. Watch the NCAA tournament these teams have large front lines and good quick guards if we want to be able to go the tournament make run we need to get to that level. SDSU team is structured with this mix and is why they are competing with p-5 schools and USD was similarly structured last year. When we won our national championship games we had good posts and size on our front line and when we went to NCAA tournament back in Big Sky our team was structured with couple 6’ 5” girls and our forwards were 6 feet to 5’10”. We can have respectable years as we are structured now but we never will reach level winning the conference and advancing in the tournament.

The athletics department is going to need to address not each sport individually, but they also need to address funding to maintain quality coaches and same time need to speed up their improvement in facilities plan. The athletic department needs improvement on communications to promote more positive reason athletes should come to university as well as things Grand Forks community offers to athletes. They also need to get involved greater Grand Forks community selling reasons they should come to games. For example, the basketball teams offer promotions to area schools to bring elementary students to the game not only good for athletic department but also for the school to get future students wanting to come to UND. I also think they need to work on getting the student body out to the games like food promotion and maybe some kind of participation raffle or something fun to draw students out. I know it sounds corny but professional sports do this to help market their teams. The further they develop their brand easier it becomes to market and raise money for the whole department. But they also need to put quality teams that can compete for conference championships and start winning rivalry games on regular basis. We need to have Tom Clifford attitude on how were going to beat our competition and i believe he did that nearly every day he was in charge of university, and it showed on everything in his tenure as president.

Has anyone heard if we have some pending signee or are we waiting what's available in the portal as NCAA tournament moves along. We still have 3 scholarships available as far as i know and we have to be looking for front line players and probably a post player. We need to have post player who is athletic as well has good size to play up tempo game like we like to play and can play defense extended. I am sure everyone is looking for those players, but I believe we need that immediately if with the seniors we will have back next year to make another step forward to compete with South Dakota State and several other Summit league teams. I would like to see us get couple of the players mentioned out Minnesota or Wisconsin and i don't know if were in on any North Dakota girls this year. We have some very big holes to fill after this year loosing 5 players.

If they can get to 20 win season will be definite improvement over last season and program is heading in the right direction. It would be nice to finish for Orth's career as a 1000-point scorer when she has been recognized as defensive player of the year for the conference.

Putting to much pressure on herself to score wants to reach thousand point mark.

This game follows again their weakness all year long they just can’t match up with teams that have length like Baptist. This has to be addressed next year because we’re losing to of our taller players for next year and even they were undersized and playing out of position. It appears that VanderWal and Jardine need more development may only be able to play in certain matchup at this point in their college careers.. We need at least one experience post player that we can match with Hurst. Bernard knows this and she needs to find a player before start of next season.

I think that former players should limit their response on UND especially if they have been gone from the program several years. It serves them no real purpose and they should be concerned on things where they are now. Second speaking badly about somebody can come back hurt you later in your travels of life because your future boss or potential boss may think differently could cut off opportunities in the future. I don’t know all externals between the players and coaches here and nearly all people on this board don’t know either. I think there have been mistakes made on both sides but reality is was probably better for both parties to go separate ways. I for the most part think most fans hold no deep resentment against players and wish them well. I think Sather came up in old school where basically coaches had most of power over their players and if you bucked system to much you paid price by sitting year and having hard time to find a new home. This has all changed since Sather has been hired and this has been big learning curve for all coaches. This change in situation was reflected by Sather’s end of season comments, when he said he would love to coach this group of players again next year. This statement reflected how much change has occurred in college game in last few years and why number of the old school coaches are choosing to retire. It was always hard for coaches to get players to buy into what they were trying to teach them and now I believe it’s nearly impossible to do so. The other side of this many of coaches abused their power before and is the reason for the changes we have today. I also think to many of the players believe they are going to be stars and become professional players and fact is only very select few are ever going to see that. The players that are taking advantage of playing college sport developing themselves for career that will improve their lives and opening doors for them rest of their lives are true winners. I think now college sports now needs to protect both players and colleges by developing system where players are compensated for all work time they are putting in but colleges get commitment from the players for this time effort. I believe if this doesn’t happen number of college sports may disappear because costs for both sides that institutions may drop sports and players begin to realize that if found part time job might be just as cost effective and time wise as trying to play college sport. All I know for sure is the changes we’re seeing now are going to have long term effects and the outcomes may not what we like. if you look back history we have seen where college sports have been very big and fallen out favor by public because scandal or abuses in the system we may just repeating history again with similar circumstances. Enough said and I wish Sather well and thankful for all hard work our athletes put forth each year.

I was looking at the rosters of lower bracket that UND will play and could potentially play. Cal Baptist is starts pretty tall that i think will present match up problem for us by their roster heights start 2 six-foot girls and two girls 5-10&11 and 5 -9 guard and first player in 5-8 and then they do have another 6-0 player that plays some minutes. Georgia Souther has a lot of height and appears to play number of girls. Northern Illinois also starts 3 girls at six feet or better and comparing this to upper bracket the teams are slightly smaller than average. The positive with these teams is they have beat and also lost games against common opponents but for most part the games were fairly close one way or another. So, i believe if we play up to our abilities, we should have good chance to beat these teams but were going to need to play good defense and do a good job boxing out and rebounding the basketball.

How does this tournament work is there entrance fee to cover costs and do they have a payout if there is profit to the teams. I am curious or is just cost you so much to enter the tournament. If $35,000.00 is going to make or break the athletic department UND should be then working very hard to increase revenues because they need to get some positive news out there to promote the school and students and state can look to as source of pride. Especially with quality individuals they have on this team representing us.

I see we have been selected for the tournament with first round game against cal Baptist.

I see that to be considered you have to completed contract back in February and I never heard any announcement if we did do that.

Has there been announcement on teams selected WBI tournament.

The schools must pretty much know what's going to happen before these shows go on because how else could they get this settled in few hours and agree to be part of these tournaments. Also, they have only few days to book travel and get to their designations. Especially the Wnit where the teams get to bid on hosting games. Maybe somebody knows how all this works.

What have you heard on post season play for the women?

I was adding the scholarship of Amanda Roach who left just before start of the season and went on to transfer Lake Superior University. Then adding in the 5 seniors for this year.

The mention of the 23-24 season, I have to start with the construction of the roster for UND. They will have 6 scholarships available as it stands now to construct the roster. They already have 3 freshmen commits for next season leaving three openings. The three commits are one guard and two guard-forwards who are just around 6 feet tall. I have to believe they have to be looking for one of these positions to be plus 6-foot player that will be able to provide minutes right away. The reason for that if we're going to be able to make run for the Summit we need to start matching up with taller teams where we had trouble this past season. Being quick and athletic only goes so far because number of these teams are still athletic and being tall give them definite match-up advantage. Also, Hurst does have big presence inside, but I think it's going to take her time to figure out how control her play without getting in foul trouble because she is such aggressive player both offensively and defensively that leads to her picking up extra fouls. Then comes the question if Kacie's sister does want to come UND and how that will affect team. I think with right addition of these 3 open spots we can compete to be one of the top teams in the Summit. I sure do hope we can get post season invite because that extra playing time will be such positive for younger players gaining valuable experience and has been one reason South Dakota schools have been ahead of rest of the schools in the Summit. It also helps to recruit better players because people want to play on winning teams. This is not to mention to help coaching staff learn also from playing better teams.

Past history of UND in getting looks at post season invites i am not very confident on getting a bid. I can't tell you the reason but there seems to be some bias against us and i don't know if stems from nickname or other reason. I look at football can have best bid in still don't get to play at home or send us to deep south and have to dress in outdoor tent. Last time Women's basketball ends up playing very good Weber team and loose in very close game and they move on reach the championship game. Yeserday's loss was not the way to get into WNIT we end the season with two straight losses to number 9 seed and number 6 seed out the Summit conference and our wins against NDSU losing to number 10 seed, South Dakota loosing against 5 seed ORU pretty much lowers the value of most of their wins down the stretch on paper. I hope I'm wrong but nothing comes easy in rebuilding this program in Women's Basketball and it appears they are going to have to prove it by winning on the court to get to the dance.

Brady is asked to defend a lot of players he shouldn't be defending, and you can't say that doesn't affect his statistics. My eye test is that creates disruption on whoever he is guarding and sometimes when he gets overmatched on the person, he is defending it does lead to breakdown and easy score. The metrics doesn't always tell the whole story on players and if we get to that point the game will be done for me. It's like baseball I used to be big fan and since metrics got involved, I have quit watching games and they are trying to play the game like video game. the games have become long and boring with too many strikeouts and way too long to watch. But getting back to players that can come back will be hard decision for coaching staff in constructing rosters and maintaining players because of playing time. The problem is you have these older players getting extra year and younger players not getting say length of playing time so these older players are taking time away from younger players.

It’s just not her salary but to have success you need to have good assistants to help develop talent and also recruit talent. Mallory needs to be paid somewhere near midrange and also assistant coaches need to be brought in level play. We all expect high performance and I think we have been getting good effort to improving the program but people need to be rewarded for effort.

I wish they call some travel when we are preesing

If they are win this game need to get run right away here now.

I have been reading past couple of years and people wanting Bubba job on performance and I am no expert on football, but complaint is he hasn't advanced and won national championship like to the school to the South. Second, he hasn't won enough playoff games and in general to some on this board worst coach ever. I so then went back to all the conference members complied each team record for the last 5 years. I do know there is difference in strength of schedule and UND was independent for two of those years playing a Big Sky schedule. Here again i am sure there can be all kinds of different arguments but over 5-year period a lot of that disappears with variances. But this how current Missouri Valley records stands after 5 years. 1. NDSU 64-7 2. SDSU 51-15 3. UND 30-23 4. N.Iowa 32-26 5. ILL. ST. 27-25 6. S. ILL> 28-29 7. Young. 21-27 8. IND.ST. 19-26 9. MIss. ST. 23-32 10. USD 20-30 11. W. ILL. 9-35 Well i found interesting UND had third best record in the conference but compared to the two top teams in conference we are far behind. The question then comes are we far behind the top two teams because of coaching or is because of not being supported by university enough or because we haven't had level of success to help build the program to next level to compete. I am not expert, but these numbers above show me we are much closer to catching the front runners than we are to falling to the bottom of the conference and I believe after watching last couple of years it basically was short couple high-quality starters to push us forward and then also more quality young players to give us depth through the season. I am sure i will get blasted with this analysis but sometimes people need to see some actual figures than just opinions.

Poorly officiated game all the way around especially end of 3 and beginning of the 4. We still had our chances to come back but couple of call were three point errors against us. I sure hope that conference has some grading on officiating because there has to be some account ability to get refereeing better. What I saw there were blown calls both ways but it sure looked like homer job to get home team. Back into the game. I don’t believe that was the case but I believe officials were not position to make good call. Second we’re seeing too many flops or fall downs to get a call. the bottom line is we need to g et ready for the tournament and win our first game or otherwise all hard work put in for the year just goes away. I believe if we can win two games in the tournament we could be looking at post season play. Who knows what happens if we get to championship game we have opportunity to win the conference and that’s why we play the games. this has been good year and program is getting better and our young players are looking to make that next step forward next season. The players that are coming back next year know they can compete and played enough to know what they need to work on for the coming season. All we need to do is win get our opportunities to play in the post season to finish out this year.

Western Illinois will be tough game tonight even though on paper we should win. They are always prepared and they seem to like split most of their series with conference opponents. Ideally tonight we would win and NDSU would lose and then on top of that would be USD would lose 2 this week and Denver win Saturday then I think we would be covered if we were in tie with NDSU. I sure would like us to finish in the number two spot for locking up post season play. A sweep this week and winning games at Summit tournament would get us to 20 win game season also helping our chances in the post season. Just win tonight and Saturday and I believe everything will fall in place for this team.

I too had questioned on Bernhard but felt she would become good coach just thought it would take her several years to gain that experience. I was wrong on that and looking back interim year was unfair to her holding her responsible for outcome but would not give her full control and knowing she had time to make changes and would have time to do so. Also limited her on recruiting because would be difficult to get commitments from recruits not knowing if she was going to be their coach through college career. I think she is getting better as she goes along because she is learning how to handle team and getting better at constructing team. I impressed with this group of payers and not only how they play but high quality of individuals and, they represent university well will become very successful people in their lives. I think the future looks bright going forward it now will take time to build program to reach level where they can compete to get to next level in division I basketball but takes time by building reputation by becoming winning program year in year out. Quite a turn around in just few years .