Zenarae Antoine has some mixed emotions about how the 2020-21 regular season went down.
She’s glad Texas State got to play at all, of course. The amount of uncertainty the pandemic brought gave everyone a refreshed sense of gratitude to be back in the swing of things.
But on paper, the Bobcats are clearly a home team, finishing the year with a 6-1 record when playing inside Strahan Arena and a 4-9 record when playing anywhere else. And every time the schedule had to be altered this season, be it the NCAA cutting off the first two weeks of the season, an opponent pulling out due to COVID-19 protocols or Winter Storm Uri making it unsafe to travel in Texas, it cost the team chances to play at home.
“Our team does a great job playing at home and a lot of those opportunities we've had are pretty strong victories,” Antoine said. “And so finding a balance going into the conference tournament is gonna be important.”
Texas State (10-10, 7-8 Sun Belt) heads into the conference tournament this year as the No. 4 seed from the West Division, taking on No. 5 East Division seed Georgia Southern (11-12, 5-9). Neither team has played each other this season — the Sun Belt didn’t allow for cross-division play to cut down on the amount of travel team would have to go through and help prevent the spread of coronavirus. Antoine likened preparing for the tournament game to preparing for a non-conference matchup.
“Because one side has never played the other, it's quite strange from a scouting perspective,” Antoine said. “And in this particular case with Georgia Southern, (head coach Anita Howard) has a brand new squad and she's playing completely different. So now, changing the mindset of your athletes from, ‘This isn't the Georgia Southern that you've seen before, Georgia Southern looks just like Troy.’ And so, that mindset's like, ‘Oh wow, that's completely different than what I thought.’”
Antoine thought that the two divisions were stylistically very different. The top five scoring teams in the conference are all from the East. The top five scoring defenses in the league are all from the West. The Eagles rank second in the Sun Belt with 72.8 points per game and second to last allowing 73.8 points per game.
Georgia Southern will be without a major contributor, as McClain Baxley of The Savannah Morning News reported Thursday that senior guard and leading scorer A’Tyanna Gaulden was dismissed from the program. But Antoine the Eagles like to spread the ball around anyway and that they’ve had multiple different leading scorers on different nights throughout the year.
Texas State’s chances of making a run in the tournament largely rest on the shoulders of junior forward Da’Nasia Hood, who’s become a standout player in the conference.
Coming in as a freshman from San Antonio Wagner, Hood was mainly used as a floor spacer, starting in just five of the 27 games she played in and averaging 7.4 points. The stretch forward took on a bigger roll her sophomore year, becoming a full-time starter and the team’s leading scorer, averaging 13.6 points per game.
She’s taken it a step further this season, scoring 16.0 points per game, which ranks second in the league.
“I think that the biggest piece that I've seen from Da'Nasia is just her heart and her want to be the best she can be,” Antoine said. “It's something that's happened over time. So when she got here as a freshman, she was talented but there were some areas she really struggled in, from a conditioning standpoint, just fighting through. Then we saw her her sophomore year, she kind of picked it up and she truly made a commitment to putting a lot of extra time into her game.
“As you go through COVID, my concern was ‘OK, where's Da'Nasia going to be? This is going to be a real challenge for her as far as not being able to train the way she wants to.’ Well, this kid was getting it in at her apartment. And then when I had the opportunity to actually see her, physically, I saw that she'd put in a lot of work.”
Texas State and Georgia Southern square off in Pensacola, Fla., on Friday at 11:30 a.m. Hood’s been to the Sun Belt tournament twice now. She knows what to expect. She also knows its left the whole team wanting more.
“What I remember is just going out the first round of both years, so my goal is to at least try to get past that and hopefully go on a run and win the whole thing,” Hood said. “And I think a lot of our team that has been here in the past, it's in the back of their head, too. So we're just kind of keeping that to use that as motivation.”
