The Badger women's basketball team closed out their second and final exhibition game against Minnesota State-Moorhead with a 74-64 victory and showed statistical improvement since a loss last week in their exhibition opener against Wisconsin AAU.
UW forced 21 Moorhead turnovers Sunday and was able to convert the mistakes into 22 points, while committing only nine of its own. The mere three points the Badger women gave up on turnovers was a crucial improvement given that in the last exhibition game against AAU the women had 23 turnovers.
Wisconsin also out-shot Moorhead 45 to 38 percent, dominating the Dragons in the paint with 40 points to Moorhead's 12. Junior forward Jordan Wilson led both teams with 19 points on nine-of-14 shooting.
The Badgers once again struggled to maintain a lead as the young squad gave up a nine-point lead, missing 13 of their final 19 shots in the first half, to enter the break only up by two.
Wisconsin fired back in the second half, with the offense sparking a 28-8 run that brought the lead to 66-41 at 7:49 in the game. The lead allowed Head Coach Lisa Stone to bring in a variety of players and give nine of the 10 Badgers double-digit playing time. Three UW players finished with more than 10 points. Meanwhile, defensively, Wisconsin had 12 steals, but was out-rebounded 44 to 33.
Freshman guard Jolene Anderson was one rebound short of a double-double with nine rebounds and 17 points while senior guard Stephanie Rich had 12 points and five assists.
\I told our team that we need to get used to and taste the feeling of success,"" Stone said. ""We worked the entire week on defensive transition coverage and [displaying] more intensity on defense. We came out with some fire in our eyes, and we made some adjustments defensively.""
Wisconsin's regular season home opener begins at 7 p.m. Nov. 19 against the University of Southern Illinois.
-uwbadgers.com contributed to this report.
