The UL women’s basketball team didn’t get to its second exhibition game before the first significant injury of the season occurred.
On Wednesday, coach Garry Brodhead said 6-foot-3 freshman forward Ndioba Lo suffered a torn ACL in Tuesday’s practice and is out for the rest of the season.
“It’s just kind of heartbreaking,” said Brodhead, whose Cajuns play Mississippi Christian in an exhibition game at 6 p.m. Thursday in the Cajundome. “The kid worked hard, and yeah, that’s going to hurt our program. It just seems like we can’t, for some reason, can’t get away from it, but I guess it’s part of the game.”
A native of Dakar, Senegal, Lo showed a lot of potential in UL’s first exhibition game with 15 points and 14 rebounds in only 13 minutes.
The Cajuns still figure to be larger and more physical than they’ve been in recent years with another 6-3 freshman from Senegal, Aminata Stowe, and 6-2 freshman Kayllis Walker from Mississippi.
“We still have some strong girls,” Brodhead said. “K-Walker is very strong and so is Imani (Daniel). The way we rebounded (60 boards) in the first exhibition game, I hadn’t seen us do that much recently.
“K-Walker is going to surprise you on how fast she is. She doesn’t look fast, but she’s as fast as anybody on our team. She moves well. So you’re going to see her able to guard, and I think that’s going to be the big part it.”
Because of the team’s progress in rebounding, the coaching staff has been able to work more on pressure defense since the last exhibition game.
“We kind of started to do a little bit more pressing,” Brodhead said. “I really like what I see. I think we’re going to be pretty good at it. So we kind of put that in to see if we can speed up the tempo of the other team, make them play a little bit faster and try to get some steals on it to help our transition game.”
In other injury news, junior-college point guard Kennedi Johnson is likely going to be out two weeks after a foot injury suffered in the first exhibition game.
The good news is UL has more ballhandlers than a year ago, including junior Malaya Jones, senior Jazmyne Jackson, freshman Bailey Timmons, sophomore Amijah Price and senior Kahlen Norris.
Scoring is what Brodhead expects Jackson to bring to the table.
“She had a great summer,” Brodhead said of Jackson. “I think she’s just a shooter. If she catches and shoots it without putting it on the floor, I mean, she’s going to make it. I always tell her that, we don’t need you to put the ball on the floor. We don’t need you to be looking for all these passes that you’re looking for. We need you to score. So I think she’s going to be a scorer.”
A lot of the season will boil down to the younger players getting Brodhead’s style of defense in the early going.
“We still got a ways to go,” Brodhead said about his team’s defense. “We’re better in help than we were last year. Last year was the team that they just couldn’t help. We had some people who could kind of guard but were never in help. When Imani Daniel is in the game, she’s going to be a big part of our help.”
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