Bas­ket­ball Open­ers

Carla Mon­taruli 

Staff Writer 

Mishawaka- The Men’s and Wom­en’s bas­ket­ball teams started their sea­son 2023-24 on Oct. 26 with both games at home, against Calumet Col­lege of St. Joseph (Ind.). The Wom­en’s team won 90-24, while the Men’s brought the sec­ond win of the evening by 24 points (101-77). There was great ex­cite­ment in Wiekamp gym while the team was lead­ing the game. Play­ers from both teams were re­ally ex­cited to start the sea­son.  

“I’m so ex­cited for this new sea­son. We’ve put in a lot of work through­out this pre­sea­son with weight lift­ing and con­di­tion­ing so it was nice to see it pay off in our first game,” Kallie Har­ri­son, Ju­nior stu­dent at Bethel Uni­ver­sity.  

Ac­cord­ing to the play­ers, the first game felt fun with such a good at­mos­phere and set the tone for fu­ture goals.  

“Over­all the first game went well,” Trent Ed­wards, bas­ket­ball player at BU. “There’s al­ways stuff we can work on but this was a good first step.” 

The play­ers have high ex­pec­ta­tions, ac­cord­ing to Ed­wards, the team main goal is to im­prove and be con­tenders to win the NAIA tour­na­ment.  

For both teams, the be­gin­ning of this sea­son will be a work in progress. 

“ The pos­i­tive as­pect is that we have a lot of new pieces to out team this year that other teams aren’t ex­pect­ing,” Har­ri­son said. “These few first games are go­ing to help us in fig­ur­ing out how to work to­gether.” 

The Men’s team will face Ore­gon tech away on Nov 3 , while the Wom­en’s will play at home against Uni­ver­sity of St. Fran­cis on Nov 1.