Many college basketball fans know the saying: it’s hard to beat a team three times in a year.
Unfortunately for the Creighton women’s basketball team, they only got two chances to beat the Kansas Jayhawks, who ended the Bluejays’ season in the historic Allen Fieldhouse in the second round of the WNIT on Monday.
After beating University of California-Riverside on Saturday at the Omaha Civic Auditorium, the Jays traveled to Lawrence, Kan. for their second match up with the Jayhawks. Kansas, who needed overtime to beat the Jays earlier in the year, beat the Jays by a score of 79-64 on Monday.
This season the Bluejays handled some adversity before the year even started. The Jays lost senior guard Michelle Kaus to a year-ending ACL tear and junior forward Sam Schuett to a season-ending ankle injury.
After losing two key players, the Jays opened the year with a tough non-conference schedule and went 2-6. Following that rough start, the Jays posted a 20-6 mark the rest of the way, leaving them with a 22-12 record at end of the season.
The Jays ended up in second place in the Missouri Valley Conference regular season race and were literally seconds away from a NCAA tournament bid before being shocked by a buzzer-beater with less than one second to play in the MVC tournament championship game in St. Charles. Mo.
Head women’s basketball coach Jim Flanery spoke about the painful defeat.
“Certainly, the loss to Evansville in the MVC Championship was extremely painful,” he said. “To come so close only makes falling short of a goal more difficult and tougher to get beyond. It’s one of the great things about athletics, though, that we don’t always get rewarded in the way we want or think maybe we deserve.”
Looking forward to next year, the Jays only lose one player from this year’s rotation. Starting senior center Kristina Voss has been an inside presence for the Jays but is out of eligibility.
In addition, Kaus will not return to the team after her second ACL tear. She will instead focus on her nursing major.
For the team to improve on this year’s mark, Flanery said they will need to polish individual skills, along with strength and conditioning for some of the younger members of the team.
“For our older players, it comes down to focusing on two or three specific things and then continuing to work hard in the strength and conditioning areas,” Flanery said. “For our younger players, the strength and conditioning areas are huge, and they hopefully also learned a lot in terms of understanding what is expected and how much quicker the game is.”
With all things considered, it is hard for the Bluejays not to be proud of their accomplishments.
This team fulfilled its expectations of a second-place MVC finish, even after the injuries, and in the opinion of associate sports information director Rob Simms, this may have been Coach Flanery’s best coaching job in his seven-year career at Creighton.
“We were picked second in the MVC and still managed to finish there even without those two players [Schuett and Kaus]. Easily the best coaching job Flan has done in his seven years, at least in my opinion and many others,” Simms said.