Skylights return home to face the Saints

Through the first month of the season, the Montana State University-Northern women's basketball team has earned a 3-3 record. As the Skylights return home to face Our Lady of the Lake University this Saturday at Armory Gymnasium, MSU-N head coach Chris Mouat believes they need to play better than they have to start the year if they want to defeat the Saints.

"We need to play better at both ends, clean a lot of things up that have been hurting us," Mouat said. "We're playing hard but we need to clean up our act a little bit."

The Saints enter the game with a 1-5 record this season. However, Mouat believes they have played a tough schedule and are much better than their record indicates.

"They have great speed across the board," Mouat said. "They really do a nice job of forcing turnovers, they anticipate well and they got some kids that can really score so they're a tough team with a lot of tradition."

There are many OLLU players that could give the Skylights some trouble. Natalia Trevino averages 13.8 points a game on 37.9 percent for the Saints. Emiko Hemphill will also try to make an impact on the boards as she averages 7.7 rebounds a game and 4.2 offensive rebounds a game. But the main player the Skylights will need to game plan for is Kevionna Barber who averages 14.2 points a game on 36.4 percent shooting.

"Their point guard's phenomenal," Mouat said about Barber. "She's lightning quick, can get the three up from deep range and gets to the rim. She's their engine for sure. She really makes them go."

Through the first six games of the season, the Skylights' main issues have been turnovers, defense and shooting. With such a tough opponent this weekend, Mouat knows fixing these issues will be key if they want to pull out the win.

"Win or lose, those have been issues for us in every game," Mouat said "We're going to work on execution on the offensive end and try to do what we can there to generate some more points because we made life pretty difficult on ourselves."

While the Skylights still have much to work on ahead of this weekend's game, they do have some advantages heading into the game. While the Saints have speed, the Skylights have size over the Saints which Mouat hopes they can use to their advantage.

"Where they have speed on us, I think we have some size on them," Mouat said. "We'll want to continue to focus on being an inside out team and getting the ball on the block and trying to finish inside and having balance. I think that's a big thing for us right now."

Another positive for the Skylights is that it will be their first game at home since their season opener against Dickinson State University on Oct. 26. Since then the Skylights have played away from home, including a seven-day trip to Washington. Along with the return home, Mouat believes this game against a tough OLLU team will show what the Skylights are made of.

"It's just a different nonconference type game than we usually get and to have somebody who's traditionally a nationally ranked team with such a great history in their program, it's awesome," Mouat said. "It's nice to be home and get our feet under us here and have some normal practices and get back to things."

The Skylights will play the Saints at Armory Gymnasium Saturday at 5:30 p.m.