WBB Preview: Utah State Begins Home-And-Home With Wyoming

"Look, we’ve gotten beat up tonight," head coach Wes Brooks told his team after their loss to Boise State. "But let’s use this to get better. If we get better and we put some good minutes together, it's going to bode well when we go to Wyoming"

Utah State gets the unusual opportunity to play the same team twice in a row as it looks to snap out of a losing spell, drawing back-to-back games against Wyoming, starting Wednesday night in Laramie.

"You play the first game, then you put wrinkles and adjustments in for the second game, and then you play that one," Brooks said. "We need to try to go get two (wins) this week."

Elise Livingston knows the schedule, but she’s not focused on the strange quirk that resulted in what Brooks described as a mini-series akin to an NBA series. Instead, she’s focused on putting a five-game losing streak in the rearview mirror.

"Just try to get the win," she said of the team’s game plan. "It's just been a couple of games that you obviously don't want to have that kind of performance as a team. It gets frustrating, and I feel like we just need to come together and play for each other, share the ball, move the ball, and just… I don't know, find a way to win, any way possible. Even two in a row, because it's the same team."

The Wyoming Cowgirls are Malene Pedersen, and Malene Pedersen is the Wyoming Cowgirls. Revolving around Pedersen, the Cowgirls are more dependent on one player than any other team in the conference. On average, Pedersen accounts for 31.7 percent of the team’s points. The next highest in the conference is the Colorado State Rams, who lean on Lexus Bargesser for 23.4 percent of their scoring.

That was especially true until the beginning of this month, when Jane Rumpf emerged to help remedy the centralized offense, but this is still Pedersen’s team. Rumpf included, there are players who can step up, but those performances haven’t been reliable. For opponents of the Cowgirls, managing the players around Pedersen can dictate what this team is capable of.

Most recently, against Air Force, Pedersen had 24, and Rumpf added 17 and the Cowgirls won 67-44. Against Boise State, Pedersen had 14 of the team’s 40 points and was one of three starters that scored. The other two added a combined 11 points and the Cowgirls went on to lose 77-40. Before that, in an 82-53 loss, Rumpf and Pedersen were tied at 16 as the leading scorers. Rounding out the starting five, Logann Alvar and Hanna Sandvik each added 11, and Lana Belsic didn’t score.

Just a year after playing in the conference championship game, the Cowgirls are reeling. At 5-12, they haven’t found much success regardless of who is doing the scoring. They are coming off a win, but that win snapped a six-game losing streak.

Pedersen is averaging 17.1 points, 3.8 rebounds and 2.2 assists per game. The last time she had a single-digit scoring night was Jan. 4 of last season. Her season low is 10 points, and she only did it once on Dec. 14. She’s leading the team in scoring by such a wide margin that she’s averaging more than the next two scorers combined.

As much as Pedersen is a player to keep an eye on, her impact on the game is very much dependent on the surrounding players. Her performances have been consistent over the team’s 5-12 start to the season. That isn’t true of Rumpf, who has burst onto the scene lately.

Rumpf is on a five-game streak of looking like an entirely different player. After posting three games without scoring and not reaching double figures at all in her first 12 games, she dropped a career-high of 11 on San Diego State to kickstart her transformation. Since then, she has set two new career highs of 16 and 17, has notched two double-doubles, and is averaging 10.8 points and 6.8 rebounds compared to her season averages of 5.2 and 3.4.