UWRF women's basketball tops WIAC with six-game winning streak

The UW-River Falls women’s basketball team is on a six-game win streak, and has gone undefeated so far this season.

Although conference play has not started, UW-River Falls tops all other teams around the WIAC, including the favored UW-Oshkosh, which is currently 4-0.

UWO was picked to finish first in conference by WIAC head coaches and sports information directors in a preseason poll, according the the WIAC sports website. The UW-River Falls Falcons were picked to finish fifth. But that prediction hasn’t dampened the will of the team to succeed.

Starting forward for the team, Kate Theisen, said the team had a lot to prove.

“I think we’re going to surprise a lot of people, to be honest. We kind of have been rebuilding and working on stuff, and I think we’ve been playing really well,” she said. “I think we can do really well in the conference and surprise people that maybe weren’t expecting us to do well.”

That expectation came from the finish the women had last year. After tying with UW-Stout for eighth place in the conference, and going 4-12 in conference play, no one has really expected the women to be doing as well as they are.

No one, that is, besides Head Coach Cindy Holbrook and her team.

According to Holbrook the women have an edge against the other teams because they have a strong group of returning players.

“You can see as they get older and more mature, their confidence rises and their physical strength and mobility gets better,” she said. “Just having some kids with experience in the WIAC is really important.”

The experience the women have comes from a group of 11 returning players, according to the UWRF sports information website. Theisen said the experience is special to this particular team.

“The majority of the girls that play together have been here for three years now all together,” she said. “So it’s really, really unique that we got to play here for so long.”

But Holbrook said it runs deeper than just knowing each other and playing together for a couple years.

“They really like each other. They support each other. I think they’re going to stick together and really put their best foot forward for each other,” Holbrook said. “It’s really hard to get a whole group that would put themselves out there for each other and I think we have that group right now.”

As their love for each other grows, so does their ability to achieve wins. After taking down

Bethel University on Nov. 24, which was predicted to win the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference this year, the Falcons are continuing to prove the preseason poll wrong one game at a time.

This is the longest opening win streak the team has seen since its 2011-2012 season, when it started with an 11-game win streak. The women hit the court again at 7 p.m. Dec. 7 against St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.