Joe McKeown enters his sixth season as the Northwestern women's basketball coach. He currently holds a 70-85 record at NU and has yet to earn a berth in the NCAA Tournament. Still McKeown has a talented group of returning players and an impressive freshman class, and spoke with North by Northwestern about his observations of the team leading up to the season opener.
How's the team been meshing chemistry-wise with the mixture of experienced veterans and talented newcomers?
Good, good. I think our biggest challenge is just getting to know each other right now. We have four freshmen, and we have five sophomores. It's a young team, and we haven't practiced enough. You've got to get into some battles. We've got some games coming up, and I think that'll help us. We're just going to use everything between now and Christmas to learn each other more than anything else.
Karly Roser does so many things well and is a triple-double threat every night. Is there anything that she's been able to add to her game?
I think the biggest thing that she's worked on is becoming a better outside shooter. To have three-point opportunities, just for her to be a threat from there to complement the rest of her game, she's worked really hard in that area.
You talked about how this is probably the most athletic team you've had at Northwestern. Has it been a point of emphasis in recruiting to get more athletic players than you have in the past?
Yes. One of the knocks on us when I got here was how we were big and slow. The Big Ten has become a faster league. College basketball is going in that direction. We're playing with a 30-second clock. I think athletically, we're able to do some things we haven't done before transition-wise, and that's been helpful.
Who have you seen taking most of the scoring load lost with Kendall Hackney and Dannielle Diamant?
I think that's going to be by committee some nights, but I feel like Maggie Lyon has that scoring mentality. She'll be able to pick up some of that. It gives other people opportunities, too. Lauren Douglas had games where she had 20 points last year, so she has the ability to score. Whoever else is going to get those minutes is going to find ways to get shots.
Who have you seen stepping up to replace what you lost in the frontcourt from last season?
We've got a 6-foot-5 center, Alex Cohen, who's a junior now. Last year, we won at Illinois, and she had 12 points, 10 rebounds, so she's capable. Dannielle and Kendall gave us 2,500 points that we've got to replace. In any program, that creates opportunity, so the opportunity for her to step up is going to be there, and probably for some of our freshmen, too.
You have to deal with similar rule changes to what has been instituted in the men's game. Have you found that that's changing your game planning at all?
I think it's one thing to say in practice that these are the rules. Seeing the rule changes come through in the summer and talking to officials, it's the direction that everyone wants to go. But then, when you actually get into a game situation, trying to get used to how the game's going to be called, we don't know yet.
I see you only have three in-state players on the roster this year. How have you guys been able to get so far out in recruiting.
I think Northwestern, obviously, is a national and international school. Chicago's a great city, so people know about Northwestern academically. My goal when I took the job was to be like Duke and Stanford, teams that I've recruited against and competed against a lot. When you look at their rosters, it's pretty similar as far as where their players are coming from. We don't want to limit ourselves to the local area because every year that changes. I just feel like we're a national school as a university, so our recruiting should be nationwide.
What do you see as the biggest challenges in contending in the Big Ten this year?
The biggest challenges are going to be the other schools. I don't mean that as a joke. It's a bizarre league. I've never been in a conference where last year, the team that won the regular season and the team that won the Big Ten Tournament lost to the team that finished 11th and 12th in the league. It's like the old NFL where everyone was 8-8. Teams separated a little bit in March, but the regular season was a dogfight.