The ASU women’s basketball team has been learning the hard way all season long.

Saturday’s 66-62 home loss to a Washington State team that had not won a conference game all season and had not won in Tempe since 1997 was the hardest lesson of all for the still young and inexperienced bunch.

But there isn’t time to dwell on one defeat during the final month of the regular season.

The first chance for the Sun Devils to bounce back comes when they travel to the Pacific Northwest this week to face Oregon State on Thursday and Oregon on Saturday.

“One thing about this team is when they do not get it done, we have a meeting and we talk about it,” ASU coach Charli Turner Thorne said. “They’re resilient. I think that’s some of our youthfulness. I think when you’re young, you tend to [say] ‘OK, next game’ [and] you move on a little bit quicker.”

ASU beat UO and OSU last month in Tempe and will be trying to sweep the season series against both teams for the fifth consecutive season.

And just like the Sun Devils’ last opponent, OSU has had all kinds of trouble getting in the win column in 2010.

The Beavers (9-12, 1-9 Pac-10) come into the contest on an 10-game losing streak, with their only Pac-10 victory coming on New Year’s Day against WSU.

On paper, OSU is a team the Sun Devils (14-8, 6-5 Pac-10) should beat. But the same could have been said for WSU, and ASU sophomore guard Alex Earl said that game taught the Sun Devils that no opponent in the Pac-10 is a pushover.

“I don’t know why we would ever take anybody in the Pac-10 lightly, and we totally did in Washington State,” she said “I think some of the young players don’t really know that yet, because in high school you have those teams [that] you’re going to blow out by 60 or 70 [points]. You don’t do that in the Pac-10.”

The Beavers are paced by junior guard Talisa Rhea, who ranks fifth in the Pac-10 in scoring with 17.4 points per game.

But Rhea has not gotten much help from her teammates, as the Beavers rank last in the Pac-10 and 259th in the nation in scoring offense (58.8 points per game).

The Beavers’ last game against the Sun Devils provides the perfect example of their offensive dilemma. Rhea scored 20 points, but OSU only scored 47 total.

One area where OSU has been strong all season long is rebounding differential, where it ranks second in the conference (+8.5). The last time the Sun Devils and Beavers met, OSU outrebounded ASU 31-29.
“For us, that’s our greatest strength, so we can’t lose that battle,”
Turner Thorne said. “We’ve got to be huge in that area.”

ASU’s inside game struggled in general the last time against the Beavers, as the Sun Devil post players combined for just 10 points in a contest where sophomore center Kali Bennett did not play because of a suspension by the Pac-10.

Instead, the ASU perimeter game, which has had troubles all season, picked up the slack and combined to score 46 points.

Against Oregon, the Sun Devils will once again try to neutralize the high-powered, run-and-gun Duck offense that leads the nation in scoring with 85.2 points per game.

ASU held UO to 68 points during their last matchup in January, and the game plan will be similar again this time around.
Slow things down.

“It’ll be ‘crawl ball’ to the nth degree,” Turner Thorne said. “Up there [at home], they don’t miss. If they have a clean look, it goes in the basket.”

The player the Sun Devils least want to give clean looks to is senior guard Taylor Lilley, who is one of the nation’s most lethal shooters from downtown. She ranks third in the country in 3-point field-goals made (3.6 per game) and fourth in the Pac-10 in scoring (17.5 points per game).

Another area where the Sun Devils need to improve considerably is with taking care of the ball, as ASU turned the ball over a season-high 29 times against WSU and currently rank 256th in the nation in that category (19.8 per game).

“That’s something we’ve been working on all season long,” ASU senior forward Kayli Murphy said. “I think it was a little bit of both losing focus, and Washington State had really good pressure. I think they really surprised us with how much they pressured us.”

The trip to the Northwest will be a homecoming for Earl, who grew up in Portland and then went to Southridge High School in Beaverton.

“I’ve had a bunch of my friends call me and ask me for tickets,” Earl said. “[No other players use] their tickets for Oregon, so I get to use all my tickets. Most of my friends are from UO, but my family, my high school team and my coaches will be at [the] Oregon State [game].”

And those friends, family members and teammates might get to see Earl play more at point guard, as ASU’s starting point guard, junior Tenaya Watson is currently day-to-day while nursing a foot injury.

“I played point guard all four years [of high school],” Earl said. “I’ve got to get some confidence back. I’m going to back to Oregon, so maybe it will bring back some memories of how to play the [position].”

Reach the reporter at gina.mizell@asu.edu