STARKVILLE — Eleven won’t be a number that defines the 2011-12 Mississippi State women’s basketball team.
Instead, the Lady Bulldogs will use that number, which corresponds to where media members picked them in the Southeastern Conference preseason poll released Tuesday, as motivation.
The news coincided with the annual season-opening news conference for the squad and left MSU coach Sharon Fanning-Otis and all of the players who had a chance to talk about the ranking nonplused.
“It is nothing new,” senior guard Diamber Johnson said. “It is like that every year, but it is going to be us not proving anybody wrong but proving ourselves right.”
Johnson is one of six seniors who returns from a team that went 13-17 (4-12 SEC) last season. Coming off the program’s first trip to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament, MSU struggled to work in 11 new players, but found its footing down the stretch, going 5-5 in the final two months of the season. That record included an upset of Auburn University in the first round of the SEC tournament.
After losing senior guard Mary Kathryn Govero to graduation, Fanning-Otis and the players said expectations are higher and the team has returned better equipped to act on those feelings.
“It’s their opinion,” sophomore guard Katia May said of the preseason ranking. “I feel we will be surprising to people this year and we will plan on changing that.”
May said MSU is a better team than last year because it has better chemistry, it is communicating and working harder, and it has a talented cast of newcomers that will add depth and athleticism.
Johnson, who led the team in scoring (12.8 points per game) and emerged as a confident team leader at the end of the season, said MSU doesn’t “deserve” a higher preseason ranking because it has six returning seniors or that it played some of its best basketball in February and in March. She prefers to highlight a new attitude the team will carry into the season that will push it to greater heights.
“We know what we have, and we know what we should’ve had and where we ended up last year, which is where we should have been the whole year,” Johnson said. “We have all of those returning aspects and more, so we know what we have this year and we are a lot farther than we were last year and a lot closer.”
Kendra Grant, a 5-foot-11 guard/forward from Richland, leads the group of newcomers. Fanning-Otis said Grant and Martha Alwal, a 6-4 center from Minnesota, could earn spots in the starting lineup. She also said Jerica James, a 5-5 point guard from Arkansas, and Shamia Robinson, a 5-8 standout from West Oktibbeha County High School, also will challenge for minutes.
Fanning-Otis the newcomers are making a lot of progress, but plenty of questions remain to be answered before MSU will play Arkansas-Fort Smith at 2 p.m. Nov. 6 at Humphrey Coliseum in an exhibition game. The team will open the regular season at 7 p.m. Nov. 11 against Jacksonville State at home.
By that time, Fanning-Otis hopes everyone will have embraced the concepts of “Be the One,” “Get Your Numbers,” and “Family” that will propel the program back to the NCAA tournament.
“They have to step up,” Fanning-Otis said. “They understand the word consistency, they understand the word work ethic, and they understand our system better. We are tweaking things and learning a lot, but they have an understanding they didn’t have last year.”
Adam Minichino is the former Sports Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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