TERRE HAUTE — Everyone associated with the Rose-Hulman women’s basketball team knew the adjustment to life after Rebekah Forsyth and Suzy Carlson would be challenging.
Both players finished their final season of eligibility last year, with Forsyth No. 1 and Carlson No. 3 on the institute’s all-time scoring list for women.
Last season, Forsyth averaged 16.8 points per game and Carlson 15.3 ppg in leading the Engineers to a 21-5 record, the best in program history.
This season has started respectably for Rose, which defeated Robert Morris-Springfield 63-56 Tuesday evening in Hulbert Arena to improve its overall record to 7-8.
In the nine-team Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference, the Engineers sit in fifth place at 3-3 with their next game slated for Saturday afternoon at Hanover.
“It is a new team,” Rose-Hulman women’s coach Jon Prevo assessed. “Each year, you’re going to have graduating seniors. Even if we had returned everyone from last year’s team, this would be a different team because of things that they would have worked on and things that we would have grown on in a year’s time.
“You don’t replace players like Rebekah and Suzy. They were so valuable, not just on the court, but what they did as far as leadership qualities and friendship with their teammates. And this team is starting to grow in those aspects. We’re trying to find our own identity and we’ve struggled at times.”
Unlike last season, when only the top four teams in the conference advanced to the HCAC tournament, six teams will move on this season.
Rose lost to Transylvania 61-49 in the first round of the 2007 HCAC tournament in Manchester’s gym. In 2008, the Engineers want to win the HCAC tournament, even without Forsyth and Carlson in uniform. (Carlson remains a part of the team as an assistant coach.)
But first the Engineers have to get there and they’ll be relying heavily on a veteran, senior guard Jill Floyd of Bloomington, Ill., and a freshman, 6-foot center Donna Marsh of Mobile, Ala., to help them do just that.
At 21, Floyd is in her fourth season as a starter, having averaged 12.7, 11.5 and 8.5 ppg in her previous three seasons. She’s majoring in applied biology.
“Jill does a great job for us, both on the court and off the court,” Prevo said. “She’s a tremendous young lady. A lot of the things that Jill does for us don’t even show up on the stat sheet. She defends very well. [Against Manchester on Saturday,] she was one of our main ball-handlers.
“Without having two of our main offensive weapons from last year [Forsyth and Carlson], [opposing] teams are more focused on her and trying to take some things away. And she’s become more comfortable in understanding what teams are trying to do to her.”
Entering Tuesday’s contest, the 5-6 Floyd was tallying 8.4 points per game, shooting 81.6 percent from the free-throw line and sinking a team-high 16 shots from 3-point range.
Meanwhile, Marsh was averaging a team-high 9.3 points and 8.1 rebounds per outing while posting five double-doubles before Tuesday. She’s majoring in biomedical engineering.
Marsh may not be at Forsyth’s level in the post yet, but she’s showing plenty of potential.
“You’re never going to replace players from the year before,” Prevo stressed. “It’s a situation of taking the new talent that you bring in or the existing talent you have in your program and adapting that to what we’re trying to do from an offensive standpoint and a defensive standpoint. Donna, from night to night, her offensive stat line is going to be different because of her adjusting to college basketball. She was farther along as a defensive player when she got here compared to her offense.
“She does a nice job of defending and altering shots inside. What she’s got to become more accustomed to is adapting to more physical contact at the college level. She does a great job of reposting now. We’ve got to do a much better job, once she reposts up, of trying to find her again within our scheme of things.”
With 40 blocked shots in her first 14 games as a collegian, Marsh has become one of the HCAC leaders in that category.
“She has taken a lot of [opposing] players out of their offense completely because she’s altered their shots,” Prevo noted. “Donna has a a bright future ahead of her.”
“I think she’s going to be amazing,” Floyd said of Marsh. “She’s so athletic. She’s really good around the basket, but I think she can get even better. So I’m real excited. I’ll want to come back [after graduating] and watch her play.”
The 18-year-old Marsh admits, however, that improvements are needed to take her game to the Forsyth level.
“I get a little frustrated when bad things happen and that gets me outside my game,” she said. “I need to work on staying focused, just like the rest of the team, so that I’ll be able to play my game and help the team out more.”
Floyd said the team as a whole needs to be more consistent, referring to Saturday’s 57-45 home loss to Manchester, the first-place team in the HCAC, as a primary example.
“We lost Suzy and Rebekah, so that was like 32 points a game,” Floyd pointed out. “That’s hard to come up with [from new players]. But I really feel like we are growing each game. We’re coming more together. We’re finding out more about each other — what everybody’s strengths and weaknesses are.”
“We’ve had to change the way that we play a little bit,” added Marsh, who saw a few Rose-Hulman games when Forsyth and Carlson played last season. “We don’t have as many scorers, but we play very well on the defensive end. So we’re not scoring as much as we did last year, but our opponents aren’t scoring as much either.”
The Engineers have 10 conference games left before the HCAC tournament takes place Feb. 29 through March 2, so Floyd and Marsh realize now is the time to start peaking.
“Everybody’s still focused on getting to the conference tournament and going far in that tournament,” Floyd insisted, “and hopefully going to the NCAA [Division III] tournament.”
College
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Joseph C. Garza
Discussion
The new and the old: Rose-Hulman women moving on to new standout players
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