Improvement is key for Northern in non-conference home games

MARQUETTE - The Northern Michigan University women's basketball team has four non-conference games before the start of its conference schedule.

The Wildcats would obviously like to win those contests, but more important to coach Troy Mattson is improvement.

His team will get a chance to do both in a pair of upcoming games, Northern's first at the Berry Events Center this season.

The Wildcats (1-0 overall) take on Marygrove College at 11 a.m. Saturday before facing Finlandia University at 5:30 p.m. Monday.

"You're constantly trying to improve to get yourself ready for the (Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) season," Mattson said.

"We want to continue to improve off of what we've been doing so far."

Two key areas in which the team would like to get better are both on the offensive side of things: turnovers and fast-break offense.

Northern turned the ball over 23 times in its 63-60 season-opening win at Minnesota Duluth last Saturday. Roughly 30 percent of the Wildcats' possessions ended with them giving the ball away.

Mattson said he expected turnovers to be up a bit since it was the team's first game of the season. But that number was still far too high for his liking and something he said the team can not do against GLIAC competition.

Sophomore guard Steffani Stoeger agreed and said the team would like to get that number down to around 14.

"You just got to slow down the game," Stoeger said. "Sometimes you give them the ball and just get out with it too fast. You've got to slow it down, see what you got and not overthink things, basically."

That's about the only part of the offense Northern wants to slow down, though, as the Wildcats will use these next two games to continue working on their fast-break.

Northern believes, with the depth it has throughout the roster, it will be able to run an up-tempo, high-octane style of play.

"We're looking to really fast-break as fast as we can," Mattson said.

Senior guard Kelsey Deacon, who scored a game-high 28 points in the win over the Bulldogs, said she believes the team has made strides in becoming a better running team, pointing to the team's film study as a major reason why.

Practice, as a whole, has been very good so far, according to Mattson.

"I feel like we have been improving and that's the biggest step," Mattson said. "If you improve in practice, things should follow through in the game."

That would be especially good this weekend as Deacon said the team is looking to show something to the fans at the Berry.

"We've been working hard," she said. "Preseason, postseason. There's a lot of us, this is our fourth year or third year, so we want to go out and show everybody how good we can be."