MADISON – The dog days of the season are in November for the Wisconsin women’s basketball team.
The Badgers open the season with a run of five games in 11 days. They’re in the toughest stretch of that run now: three games in five days.
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Monday, Nov. 10, they faced UW-Milwaukee at the Kohl Center and scored a 75-46 victory that raised their record to 2-1, thanks to a balanced effort on the offensive end and flashes of the defense coach Robin Pingeton seeks on the other.
Junior guard Breauna Ware finished with 13 points on 4-for-7 shooting for UW. Sophomore wing Jovana Spasovski added 11 points, her career high.
Three other players finished with nine points: graduate guard Destiny Howell, senior guard Ronnie Porter and senior forward Gift Uchenna.
Howell, who played four seasons at Howard, scored her 1,500 collegiate point.
No player played more than 21 minutes 30 seconds. Eleven players got at least 10 minutes. And on a night when Pingeton cleared her bench, 12 of UW’s 15 players scored.
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“We just had some players come in and I thought really, really had some good minutes for us,” Pingeton said. “That’s how you extend those opportunities and so proud of them for that.”
Here are four takeaways from the game:
Badgers hold UWM to 30% shooting, defense locks in for stretches
Milwaukee (1-2) didn’t shoot better than 35.7% in any quarter and didn’t have a scorer in double figures (redshirt junior guard Jada Williams led the team with eight points).
The Badgers got into the passing lanes – they made 16 steals – and between Ware, Porter and freshman Nikki Kerstein, they made the Panther guards work each time they brought the ball up court.
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Pingeton wants the team’s aggressiveness to continue to increase but saw some intentionality from her players when it came to playing at a high level on that end of floor.
“I think that it definitely could have been a lot more consistent and we could have upped another notch when we started the game,” Howell said. “But we did turn them over. We did keep that defensive intensity for the most part when we’re in the passing lanes and I think that it showed.”
Breauna Ware provides glimpse of her skillset
Ware averaged 14.7 points per game at Stony Brook last year, but during the first two games didn’t force her scoring. She was 1 for 5 shooting.
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Monday, she made four of seven shots and was 2 for 3 from 3-point range. The 5-7 guard possesses a quick first step and it helped her draw a game-high four fouls that led to 3-for-4 shooting from the line.
She also has the ability to be a pest defensively, something she showed in her dogged pressure on UWM point guards Valerie Cassidy-De Falco and Madison Fitzgibbon.
Gift Uchenna fills stat sheet
Uchenna, a 6-foot-3 forward, gets the stat-stuffer award for the night with nine points, 3 for 6 shooting, eight rebounds, two steals, two blocks and one assist in 17:19 minutes.
The Southern Illinois transfer continues to show the ability to put the ball on the floor for a couple of dribbles to get to a spot before taking her shot.
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“I think she’s got a really high ceiling,” Pingeton said. “She’s got some really good athleticism. I think we’ve just got to continue to help her with her execution on both sides of the ball really at different times. But she’s just such a tremendous rebounder.
“I think there’s so much more that she can bring for us and I think she’s learning that every day.”
Wisconsin doesn’t let up at the end of the game
Pingeton isn’t looking for intensity when the game is in doubt. She wants it all the time.
She took a moment to note that her team outscored the Panthers, 14-6, during the final 5 minutes.
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“I just love the intensity and our players staying engaged,” she said.
The players who got the most run during that stretch of the game were junior forward Leena Patibandla, freshman center Dorja Zaja and sophomore forward Alie Bisballe.
Patibandla was the most active, recording two assists, two steals, one block and one rebound in 4 minutes 46 seconds of action.
Also, The Prairie School graduate Reese Jaramillo, a sophomore guard, scored her first collegiate point.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin women’s basketball shuts down UW-Milwaukee for second win
