UVU Women’s Basketball Continues Run By Blasting Past Tarleton – Daily Herald

Traditional college basketball wisdom is that a team playing at home has an edge, since it has more support and should be more comfortable with the environment.

But sometimes a squad needs to get on the road to find itself.

That’s something that UVU head women’s basketball coach Dan Nielson has seen multiple times during the 2021-22 season.

“Going on the road, getting back together after some frustrating losses where they couldn’t avoid me, that helped,” Nielson said with a grin Wednesday. “My line is if you want me to stop saying something, start doing it. I feel like they’ve started to do that.”

A week and a half ago, his Wolverines were coming off a pair of tough home losses and had dropped in the WAC standings with a tough road trip on the horizon.

But UVU came up with a nice win at Grand Canyon and a surprising blowout at New Mexico State.

The Wolverines then came back to Orem to host Tarleton, a team that had beat them by 13 points in Texas at the beginning of January.

This time, however, the Texans were no match for a surging UVU team as the Wolverines built a big lead and cruised to the 75-53 win.

“Paying attention to detail has been a key to our success,” Nielson said. “Also, whether it has been man or zone, I think our defense has improved. We are doing a better job keeping people in front of us. Tarleton is a very good offensive rebounding team and today we held them to six offensive boards. That was a big point of emphasis.”

He said he has seen his athletes doing more of what needs to be done to win.

“It’s been about what we need to do in this game,” Nielson said. “It’s coach-speak but I feel like the buy-in has made a big difference. I feel like they are really playing together for the purpose of winning, not for themselves.”

UVU has had to be there for each other because injuries have limited the team’s depth.

“We only had seven players who are usually in the rotation tonight,” Nielson said. “Normally we like to play big but we only have two bigs right now. We are down to so few people that everyone has to be on it and be ready to go. It’s frustrating but it has been about the next person up. Today Eleyana (Tafisi) played more minutes than she usually does and I thought she played great in her role.”

UVU never trailed against the Texans, scoring the first six points of the game and refusing to allow Tarleton to erase that gap.

The Wolverines put together a 20-6 run in the second and third quarters that pretty much put the game away, allowing UVU to be comfortably in front down the stretch.

The offense came mainly from guard Maria Carvalho (22 points) and center Josie Williams (18 points, 11 rebounds), but Megan Jensen, Tahlia White and Madison Grange also combined for 28 points. Nielson liked how he got contributions from a lot of players.

“Everyone was making plays when the ball found them,” Nielson said. “We always say that is you are good at it, that is what you need to do. It’s people playing the best they can.”

Now the goal is for the Wolverines to continue playing well as they build toward the WAC tournament in March.

“We’ve been talking about getting as good a seed as possible for the tournament and peaking at the right time,” Nielson said. “It’s about consistency. What happened today was the result of practice. I told them that it’s easy to find things to work on when you are losing but we’ve won a few in a run. Now they can’t fall back into that trap.”

UVU next hosts Dixie State at Lockhart Arena in Orem on Saturday at 2 p.m.

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