Women’s Basketball: UL’s Mills, post shine in 103-27 win

Eric Narcisse, Daily Advertiser, November 5, 2013

With so many talented guards on their roster, the key to success for the UL Ragin’ Cajuns women’s basketball team is likely to be their post players.

Although the Cajuns don’t have traditional post players, they are going to be relying heavily on Ashley Benjamin, Jasmin Mills, Brooklyn Arceneaux, Gabby Alexander, Adrienne Prejean and Jeremica Edwards to hold their own in the inside on both the offensive and defensive ends of the court.

On Monday, the Cajuns’ post players were dominant and enjoyed a great amount of success as UL routed Centenary 103-27 at the Cajundome in the team’s final tune-up before their season opener Friday.

“We don’t really have any post players,” Cajuns head coach Garry Brodhead said. “We call them hybrids. They can put the ball on the floor and they are a little bit small for a post player. But they can go get rebounds. I think they’ll be big, especially on the rebounding and not so much on the offensive side, but on the defensive side. We have to be able to defensive rebound.”

Against Centenary the Cajuns did a great job of rebounding the basketball as they grabbed 40 defensive rebounds en route to out-rebounding Centenary 68-27. Mills was instrumental in that department as she finished with a double-double scoring a game-high 21 points and grabbing a game-best 15 rebounds including 10 defensive.

“She (Mills) gained 17 pounds in the weight room and that’s helped her,” Brodhead said. “She’s never really been an aggressive player, but she’s being more aggressive on the boards and that’s what I like. She’s always been kind of a shooter in high school and played a little bit of the guard position. She is getting used to playing inside, banging a little bit and she’s getting better and better. I thought (Monday) she played a lot more aggressive.”

In addition to Mills, Benjamin recorded 18 points and eight rebounds, Alexander scored 11 points and grabbed seven rebounds and Arceneaux contributed with 10 points and three rebounds.

“It’s that time of the year where we’re still trying to learn ourselves," Brodhead said. “We played a lot of people to try to see who was going to guard. I thought we played hard and with a little bit of effort.”

The Cajuns, who will play host to Nebraska-Omaha at 7 p.m. on Friday, opened up the game with an 18-0 run that was snapped by a Centenary layup and followed it with a 22-0 run to take a 40-2 lead.

For the game, the Cajuns shot 53.6 percent from the field, forced 28 turnovers and watched as all 12 of their players scored at least two points in the game.

“I was very pleased on how we pushed the ball down the floor,” Brodhead said. “We talked about it before the game that we have to be a little more of a running team. That was our focus (Monday) try to get the ball down the floor in the open court and try to create some offense.”

Although some may feel the Cajuns didn’t get much out of playing in a game that was out of hand almost immediately, Brodhead disagreed as he believes it was a perfect opportunity for UL to work on its weaknesses.

“I always believe when we play a team like this in a game like this is to work on your weakness. Our weakness is to run a halfcourt set and we called halfcourt set after halfcourt set after we pushed it down. Then to guard in the halfcourt. When you’re small like we are it is not something you really want to do. When we took the lead, we said we know our weaknesses, lets work on our weaknesses right now. Not good for the fans, but it is good for our team to try and work on weaknesses and try to get better at some of the things we don’t do as good.”

Nebraska-Omaha at UL Ragin’ CajunsWhen: 7 p.m., Friday
Where: Cajundome
Records: Nebraska-Omaha 0-0. UL 0-0.