Colorado University Athletics
Brooks: Buffs' Conditioning Made Difference At Utah
January 04, 2012 | Women's Basketball, B.G. Brooks
Down 10 points at one second-half juncture, CU held Utah without a point in the final 9 minutes, finished with a 14-0 run and won 58-52.
Conditioning, contended Lappe, was "the difference in the game. I think (Utah) wore down a little bit. A lot of Utah's shots were short. You never if they're really tired or if their shots were just off, but we think we did everything up to that point to wear them down."
The Utes, said CU freshman guard Lexy Kresl, had no answer when the Buffs took them out of their preferred slower pace: "When we changed the tempo they had a harder time with keeping up. The last eight minutes is when we started running in transition and started pushing the ball on offense. They couldn't keep up defensively with that pace."
Lappe likes her team to push the pace when it can, but even in its decisive late stretch against Utah, she didn't think CU did "a great job of pushing in transition, we can do a better job with that. But for the most part, I think in the last eight to ten minutes we had another gear. I think it was more about us than necessarily about them."
Kresl said she "probably" is in her best condition ever, hedging only because she ran track at Shadow Mountain High School in Paradise Valley, Arizona, and played on a club hoops team that "ran a lot."
"So it's not too much different now," added Kresl, who is averaging 11.8 points a game and second in scoring to junior Chucky Jeffery's 17.1. "But I do feel like I'm in really good shape now."
That's been the team goal during off-season conditioning and lifting work, and James Hardy - in his fifth season on CU's speed, strength and conditioning staff - called Lappe's second Buffs team the best women's hoops group he's seen here in several areas.
"The players did an awesome job this summer as far as motivating each other, holding each other accountable and motivating themselves," Hardy said. "And that carried over into the preseason and now the conference.
"If you look at the (Utah) stat sheet, that's a good example of mental toughness - our being down by ten and then them not scoring at all in last nine minutes. The girls' resilience, the mentality of 'we're not going to lose, we're going to win this game' - that's what I was very happy with."
So was Lappe, who called this team "more physically fit and mentally fit" than her debut CU squad in 2010-11. "A lot of times it helps to be more mentally fit because players can get more mentally tired long before they're physically tired. So that's probably the biggest difference - this team is more mentally fit than they were last year."
Lappe and her staff have emphasized trying to achieve an edge in conditioning that would be prominent at Boulder's altitude (5,345 feet) and make the Coors Events Center that much more formidable.
"When our staff came in here, one of the things we knew we had to use is the altitude," Lappe said. "It's one of our greatest benefits being at (CU). And in order to use the altitude you have to be a running team. You have to play tough man-to-man defense, you have to get up and down the floor in transition offense. We do a lot of movement in our motion offense, so teams have to run a lot. That's part of what we do and it's part of the advantage we want to create."
It won't be an advantage the Buffs get to exercise until next week. This week finds them playing their first Thursday/Saturday road games in the Pac-12. The first stop is at Washington, the second at Washington State.
The quick turnaround necessitates changes in game-planning but nothing drastic as seen by the players, according to Kresl. "We always try to do one (opponent) at a time, then change our focus when that game is over," she said. "We've looked at a few things for Saturday (WSU), but we're going to try and focus on them on Friday. Right now it's only Washington."
The Buffs return to the Events Center to play California on Thursday, Jan. 12 (7 p.m.), with No. 4 Stanford visiting on Saturday, Jan. 14 (4 p.m.) Tickets, with prices starting at $8, can be purchased at CUBuffs.com/tickets or by calling 303-49-BUFFS.
Contact: BG.Brooks@Colorado.EDU
