UMD Basketball Teams Ready to Return to Action
The men will open things up at home Saturday against Winona State, while the women will face the Warriors on the road.
DULUTH, Minn. – After a delayed start to their season, the UMD basketball teams will be back in action beginning this weekend. For the women, it will be their first time playing since the pandemic cancelled the NCAA tournament before they even got to play their first round game.
“We do have some unfinished business because of the whole way our season ended last season. I think our players are super motivated from that experience of playing in the NSIC tournament and making their way down to the national tournament. We’ve gone through that. Now we actually want to play those games,” women’s head coach Mandy Pearson said.
And nearly every player from that roster is back, which means even higher expectations. The Bulldogs were picked to finish first in the NSIC North Division in the preseason coaches poll.
“The team will look a little different just because we did lose two seniors. But just starting out so far, we’re very confident and a similar team to how we were last year,” said senior guard Payton Kahl.
“In my opinion, almost every single person on our team came back better than when they left, which is a really difficult thing to do during a pandemic,” Pearson said.
As for the men, they’re on the opposite end of the spectrum with a very young team, with no seniors and just one junior.
“We have a lot of guys that kind of had the luxury last year of coming off the bench. They didn’t need to score a ton, just because we were so much dominated by [Brandon] Myer and [Alex] Illikainen. But they’re all very capable guys. They’re going into totally different roles for this season and going forward,” said men’s head coach Justin Wieck.
And the schedule will be different, too, as each week they will face the same team on back to back nights.
“Just from an opponents standpoint, I think it will be interesting to see how teams change how they’re guarding, change their offense night to night based on the result of Friday night or how things went. I’m just as interested as anybody else to see how that goes,” sophomore guard Drew Blair said.
“From a coach’s perspective, it’s probably a little bit easier just preparing for one team during the week. You can really focus on what they do. Typically we just focus on Friday’s game, and then Saturday morning we’re putting a whole new game plan for the second team,” said Wieck.
The men will open things up at home Saturday against Winona State, while the women will face the Warriors on the road.
