Indiana women’s basketball moved to 4-0 on the season with an 80-44 win over Samford on Friday evening at Assembly Hall in Bloomington.
The Hoosiers were playing shorthanded against the Bulldogs, with Lenee Beaumont still undergoing testing after tweaking her knee in a win over Bradley earlier this week while Jess Petrie returned home to Australia this week following the passing of a family member. Beamont will undergo further testing to determine her availability moving forward while Petrie is expected
to be back in Bloomington for Indiana’s matchup against Milwaukee on Sunday.
Indiana still managed a dominant win with some starring performances from a pair of freshmen. Here’s a few notes from the game:
Zania Socka-Nguemen’s big night
Socka-Nguemen, in her second season with Indiana after transferring in from UCLA, went 8-11 from the field and 1-2 from the free-throw line for 17 points, her highest scoring margin of the season.
Indiana’s offense relies a fair amount on reliable scoring all around the court. There’s few places that’s more important than right under the rim, and Socka-Nguemen has shown a reliable post game since she first arrived in Bloomington last offseason.
If she can remain this much of a scoring threat in conference play, it’ll open up so much more room for the Hoosiers’ shooters and off-ball actions to get good looks.
Strong play from Nyemchek, Battle
Addy Nyemchek and GiGi Battle, a pair of highly-rated freshmen who joined the program this season, went for 16 and 15 points, respectively, to finish just behind Socka-Nguemen in the scoring column.
Nyemchek, who went 7-13 from the field with seven rebounds and a pair of assists, has been a strong contributor throughout the early going of the Hoosiers’ season, but Battle entered this matchup with 10 total points scored across Indiana’s first three games. She went 4-5 from the field but kept drawing fouls to get to the free throw line, finishing 6-10 there to round out her scoring.
Indiana’s going to need some real contribution from its bench this season and the Hoosiers’ talented freshmen are providing the kind of early spark the program hasn’t really seen in the past.
Still winning on the glass
There’s only so much you can take from Indiana outrebounding these early opponents but you’d much rather do that than have it be competitive on the glass.
Teri Moren and the rest of the staff has been very intentional about finding more size on the roster to compete with the bigger teams around the sport, the kind previous successful rosters kept running into in NCAA Tournament play. Beating a team like Samford 50-27 on the glass is an encouraging early sign for that project.
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