The cheerleaders had to wait Monday evening.Scheduled to take the floor at 6 p.m. for practice, the Ohio cheerleaders could be found scattered all throughout the bowels of The Convo, waiting to take the floor.
On the floor past their allotted time were the Bobcats, who, coming off one of their toughest losses of the season, had no ambition of hitting the showers early.
But the Bobcats weren’t using the extra time to focus on Sunday’s 72-69 overtime loss at Miami. Instead, they were running through mock defenses that they will use against tonight’s opponent, Eastern Michigan — a move that guard Whitney Davis said shows the team knows it has to get past what happened Sunday afternoon.
“We got over it in our own minds,” Davis said. “We can’t take what happened in the last game and have it carry over to this next game.”
All was not forgotten from Sunday’s loss, or even the previous Sunday’s overtime loss at Kent State, coach Tim O’Shea said.“It really is painful to be in a situation where you have two chances to beat two of the tougher teams to beat on the road and not get it done,” he said.
The sting from these losses influenced O’Shea to create a new set of rules for how the Bobcats should play at the end of close games.
“Some of it is the breaks, the bounces, a little luck here and there or making a free throw,” O’Shea said. “There are other things that we can control, though, and we need to do a better job of that.”
One aspect O’Shea said the Bobcats can improve on is perimeter defense. This burned Ohio late in Sunday’s game when Miami’s Doug Penno knocked down a wide-open 3-pointer to ice the game.
“In football, for example, if you can put a lot of pressure on the quarterback, it makes it hard for the guys to score a lot of points,” O’Shea said. “Same thing with basketball. If you can put a lot of pressure on the ball, that can really be an effective tactic.”
The Bobcats will have to use tough perimeter defense if they hope to stop Eastern Michigan’s top two scorers tonight in The Convo. Eagles guards Carlos Medlock and Jesse Bunkley, who average 12.6 and 11.2 points per game respectively, score most of their points from behind the arc.
Ohio had no trouble with the Eagles last season in a 75-63 road victory, but will notice three new faces in their starting lineup. Along with Medlock and Bunkley, the Eagles start two freshmen and a transfer from the football team.
Sonny Troutman, who led Ohio with 19 points against Eastern Michigan last season, recognizes the Bobcats’ effort against the Eagles last season means nothing when they square off tonight.
“I don’t even remember that game,” Troutman said. “It was so long ago. They got a lot of new players so it won’t be the same kind of game.”
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