EDINBURG — After a chaotic end to conference play, the UTRGV Vaqueros remain confident and undeterred entering the 2021 Western Athletic Conference Tournament this weekend in Las Vegas despite a recent losing skid.
The Vaqueros ended a span of more than a month without any WAC competition by losing their final five conference games during a nine-day stretch.
That frantic finish to the regular season, however, should prepare UTRGV to face a familiar foe in the WAC Tournament quarterfinals with the potential of meeting another recent opponent in the semifinals should the team win its opening game and advance.
“We’ve been energized. We’re ready to go,” senior center Anthony Bratton said. “We’re trying our hardest to stay together and keep our bodies right. We talk about going to Vegas and having three games in three days. Coach Steadman has been harping on that and getting ready to go play hard.”
UTRGV will match up against New Mexico State to begin the WAC Tournament after the two teams met in a make-up game March 2 in El Paso after the two-game series between the Vaqueros and Aggies was called off in February due to COVID-19 cases within both programs at the time.
The Aggies ran away with the only meeting of the season in a 69-51 victory after the two teams traded leads for a majority of the first half before a big run heading into halftime helped New Mexico State pull ahead for good.
The winner will advance to face regular-season conference co-champion Utah Valley, which beat the Vaqueros twice to end February in UTRGV’s only games outside of Texas to this point.
Despite the losses, however, UTRGV interim head coach Jai Steadman believes those games have prepared the Vaqueros for the road ahead and helped the team find its rhythm again on the court.
“I definitely think these three series we just played are definitely going to help us. Utah Valley is one of the best teams in the league and we were right there with them in both games,” Steadman said. “New Mexico State was tough and aggressive like they always are, and then we played the best defensive team in the league with coach Billy Gillespie. I think it’s really prepared us. … I really truly believe we’re going to be able to handle this first game from a toughness and physicality (standpoint) because of what we just went through.”
The Aggies, who experienced a similar lengthy layoff to the Vaqueros, have been trending upward after a rocky start to their season filled with postponements and venue changes.
The team has won six of its last eight games to secure the third seed heading into the conference tournament riding several strong offensive performances.
Defensively, UTRGV was able to limit New Mexico State’s potent offense by holding its opponent to a 38.2% shooting clip from the floor, the lowest mark in an Aggies’ win at any point this season.
That’s a defensive trend that also carried into the Vaqueros’ losses to Tarleton State to close the regular season.
“Defensively we’re rotating, we’re talking and doing the things we need to do,” Steadman said. “We’re kind of back in our rhythm and our groove.”
“I feel like every day we’re getting back to what Coach Hill taught us,” Bratton said. “We’ve been playing defense, getting up on them as a defender, playing help defense and not allowing them to attack the middle. I feel like we’ve been doing that the past few games.”
What must turn around for the Vaqueros to secure victories in the WAC Tournament, though, will be their performance in the rebounding battle and their shooting on the offensive end.
UTRGV was badly outrebounded in its three losses to New Mexico State and Utah Valley, two of the conference’s three top rebounding squads.
The Vaqueros showed marked improvement beating Tarleton State in the battle on the boards in their regular-season finale, but shooting woes have plagued the team through the latter half of conference play.
UTRGV notched two of its three lowest-scoring games of the season in March and has struggled to convert on its 3-point attempts and free-throw opportunities recently.
For Steadman and his team, a major point of emphasis in fixing its shooting woes will be emphasizing transition and second-chance scoring opportunities set up by its physicality on defense and in the interior scrapping for rebounds.
“We need to attack and get early transition buckets,” Steadman said. “We really need to work on pushing the ball, attacking the rim and not settle for as many 3s as we have been. We’ll work on all phases of our game and obviously concentrate on (New Mexico State).”
The other key for UTRGV will be gelling as a unit on the floor weeks after losing its head coach, Lew Hill, and leading scorer in Sean Rhea.
“We’re staying together and helping each other get through,” senior point guard Javon Levi said. “That’s all we can do, stay together and know that there’s somebody to our left and to our right that we can lean on.”
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Twitter: @ByAndyMcCulloch
