Racers won't back away from title dreams
WBB: The players and coaches know exactly what's at stake this week
Murray State Head Coach Rechelle Turner doesn’t always like to hear people say good things about her team — and by “people”, I mean the fine folks at RacerBasketball.com. While it’s meant in good humor (I think), Turner’s disinterest in hearing positives almost seems to be a defense mechanism against angering the Sports Gods.
“Don’t say the good stuff out loud because we don’t want to jinx it.”
Turner’s anti-jinxing stance makes her one of roughly a billion people in sports who have taken that position over the years. Between winning streaks, or shooting streaks, or no-hitters in baseball, those topics are all but taboo.
The irony of being a proud anti-jinxer is if there is a proverbial elephant anywhere in Turner’s program, she addresses it, head on, for a very specific reason.
“One of the culture parts of our program is honesty and loyalty,” Turner said. “We have tough conversations with our kids sometimes. Sometimes it's not what they want to hear, it's what they need to hear, but we ask for that in return. We have players come in our office and they tell me things that aren't easy to hear, but it's things that I need to hear to help coach them better. That's just the foundation of our program. It's got to be about more than basketball. The older I get, the more I realize I'd like to have been prepared for some of the things that happened in my life. I might have done better or made better decisions if I was prepared for it. I just do not think trying to (shield) things from your team is the best. I think you hit them head on. You make sure that it's clear that they're there. These are the hurdles that we're going to have to go through to make this happen, and I just think it helps young people attack things head on when they know what's coming. Our players want to see the practice schedule every day. They want to know what we're going to do for the next hour-and-a-half. If they're wanting to know that, then I certainly don't need to keep from them that Halli (Poock) is going to have a hard time (returning to her former school to play) at Bradley (two weeks ago). This is a real thing. It's a real emotion. It is a human thing that's going to happen. We've got to help her through it — or what's on the line this week. There’s no reason not to just attack those things head on, and I hope that that helps them as they become adults, maybe with their children, to understand that sometimes helicoptering, and sometimes trying to protect people you love, is not always what's best for them.”
What’s on the line this week is winning a championship. It has been 16 years since this Murray State program has won a regular season title, and this would be the first for the Racers since joining the Missouri Valley Conference prior to the 2022-23 season. With games at Evansville and Indiana State this week, a pair of wins would give Murray State, at worst, a share of the conference championship. Winning a title on Saturday would be one of the landmark achievements in this program’s history, but the Racers are only focused on what’s directly in front of them.
“It’s basically just focusing on one game at a time,” Murray State senior forward Katelyn Young said. “You can't look ahead. Don't look at the, ‘What could happen or what should happen’ and stuff like that. I think it's just focus on the game. Make sure you have the game plan in your head, you're ready to play, and just take care of business.”
“I think no matter who we were going to end up playing these last two games, I think the conversation would have been the same exact thing,” senior forward Ava Learn added. “This is going to be huge for the program, for the history of the program, and moving forward as well, but we still have business we have to take care of. At the end of the day, we know we have to win, and we know we can and should win, but we’ve got to move forward and make sure we do that. I think we all know what could potentially happen, but I think we're all kind of putting that in the back of our mind and focusing on just one game at a time. Like Coach Turner says every day, ‘Just win the day.’ That's what we're all trying to stay focused on.”
Turner and her players have stared down the elephant in the room, but it doesn’t mean a few butterflies haven’t inserted themselves into the conversation as well.
“When you sit and think you're 80 minutes away from a conference championship, it can be overwhelming,” Turner said. “I know if it's overwhelming for me at my age, that it's going to be overwhelming for these young women. We're trying to keep the main thing, the main thing. We're not going to change anything about the way we do things. Kate and Ava said it correctly: It's all about winning the day. At the end of the day, we need to be a little bit better, and we need to be a little bit more prepared and learn from our mistakes on film. Then as we move into Thursday, it's 1-0 on Thursday. It's not about who we're playing, it's about us. I think that that's the way it has to be for the rest of the year. Yes, we're going to do scout. Yes, we're going to make sure we have a game plan. But more than anything, it's about what can we do to make sure that we win each and every time we play? It is a big week, but we're just trying to focus in on one thing at a time.”
Murray State will play at Evansville at 6:00pm on Thursday night. For a preview of the game, you can click here.