Jan. 7—WORTHINGTON — With non-conference action now over, the most important stretch of the season is up next for the Minnesota West women’s basketball team.
After coming out of the non-conference slate with an 8-7 record, head coach Rosalie Hayenga-Hostikka knows all too well what’s ahead for her team. The Jays are now getting ready for a tough schedule against the South division out of the Minnesota College Athletic Conference.
The first test is Wednesday against M State Fergus Falls, a team that was a turning point for the Jays last season.
They played Fergus Falls last year to an 84-78 loss which capped off a stretch of losing four of the last five. They then turned it around, losing only one more time en route to the NJCAA Division III championship.
But the Lady Jays are a different team this year, even if up-and-down Decembers are nothing new for their head coach.
Hayenga-Hostikka’s past teams had gone through their own ups and downs before conference play began, and this year’s team is proving similar.
The Lady Jays started this season 4-0 and then dropped six of their next eight games. After two solid wins in the New Year’s Classic to close out 2024, they then opened the new year with a narrow 61-58 loss Saturday to Bethany Lutheran’s JV squad.
Now as the Jays head into the MCAC South Division slate, Hayenga-Hostikka said her team has been making strides since the beginning of the season.
“I think just making huge strides, I mean, we’ve been struggling, just everything is so hard,” said the coach after the New Year’s Classic last week. “And so I hope that, you know, sometimes you climb that mountain, you just can’t get over it, you’re almost there, and then we’ve had games where we’ve fallen back down and then we struggled again.”
But she added that now may be the time the Jays make that leap, like previous recent teams had done.
“Maybe this is the point where we get over and kind of figure out, ‘All right, we’re actually a pretty good basketball team when we play as a team,'” she added. “And when we have that, I mean just that attack mentality, so I feel like we’re leaps and bounds this weekend from where we’ve been, but hopefully we can keep it going.”
But it won’t be easy against a MCAC South Division that is very good at the top with three of the top four teams in the nation coming out of that division. Rochester CTC at 11-3 overall is ranked No. 1 in the latest D3 women’s basketball poll and 10-5 Anoka-Ramsey is No. 3.
And while 5-4 Fergus Falls isn’t ranked, it is still a worthy opponent out of the division, as is 6-6 St. Cloud Technical CC.
Fergus Falls is coming off two-straight wins in the Spartan Classic Dec. 30-31 while the Lady Jays are coming off that Monday loss to Bethany Lutheran JV.
In that three-point loss, Minnesota West initially trailed by eight at halftime before trimming that deficit in the second half to come up just short. Despite getting to the free-throw line 26 times to just six for Bethany Lutheran JV, the Jays struggled shooting the ball, going just 33.3% from the field and 0-for-12 from 3-point range.
Sadie Krahling and Rhea Tucker each scored in double figures with Krahling scoring 19 and Tucker 15. Tucker also achieved a double-double with 11 rebounds as Maddie Kamm led in assists with four.
Since joining the Lady Jays basketball team after volleyball season ended, Krahling has led the team in scoring this season at 17.4 points per game. Tucker is right behind that with 16.3 per game and Katrina Schutz is at 12.5 points a game, while also leading in field-goal percentage at 42.5%. Tucker is also averaging nearly 10 rebounds per contest and Kamm is averaging 4.6 assists.
The many new faces of the Lady Jays are continuing to come together according to Hayenga-Hostikka, adding that she doesn’t want the team to be peaking in December with so much of the season left.
“Just understanding you can’t panic too much, and I have to remind myself of that sometimes,” Hayenga-Hostikka said. “But you don’t want to be peaking in December and, I don’t know, maybe it’s we go so long, you know, we start so early that that December grudge is hard, but I think that we’ve done that pretty well.”
“…Sometimes it’s a process, and it’s not ‘This part looks really bad,’ but the big picture down the road and maybe we’re getting there so understanding that I think is a big thing too,” she added. “And we’ve played a tough schedule, I mean, we’ve had, like, one Division III team in the last month or something, you know, being able to play against these teams and understanding that it’s a tough schedule.”
Wednesday’s game against M State Fergus Falls is set to start at 5:30 at the Minnesota West Center for Health and Wellness, with the Bluejays and Spartans men’s game to follow.
