The Oregon women’s basketball team seemed in good spirits as it scrimmaged full-court toward the end of Wednesday’s practice.
Starters wore the green jerseys. Down 68-65, green-team guard Jamie Craighead pulled up from three-point land and drained it with 17 seconds remaining.
The reserves, donning white, readied their offense as the final seconds unfolded. The ball found its way to point guard Alissa Edwards, who let fly a trey of her own.
“Game,” one of Edwards’ teammates said, as the ball hung in the air.
The shot looked good, but — clang — just short.
So it’s been for these Ducks this season.
For the first time in eight years, Oregon has lost six of its past seven games. The Ducks are a dismal 3-8 on the road. When the team has needed a leader, nobody has stepped up to the challenge.
After Wednesday’s practice, as each player earned the right to leave by sinking four consecutive free throws, the truth of the team emerged as players vented their frustrations.
The Ducks are not having fun.
“I just think we want to have fun because we haven’t had a whole lot of fun this year,” senior forward Angelina Wolvert said. “We just want to play hard and win and take care of the rest of the season as best we can.”
“We want to be out of this corner so badly,” senior forward Lindsey Dion said. “But it seems at times that the harder we try, the worse it gets.”

On different wavelengths
The window of opportunity to capture a third Pacific-10 Conference title narrowed when Oregon endured another tough loss at Stanford’s Maples Pavilion last Thursday.
Two nights later, the window slammed shut.
California beat the Ducks for the first time in its program’s history. While Cal players celebrated victory, Oregon head coach Jody Runge laid into her team, which surrendered a 12-point second-half lead to the Bears.
“She ripped us,” Wolvert said. “We’re not going on our senior banquet; we’re not going on our European trip; we’re not anything. We don’t represent the school well.”
And there’s more. Runge said that if Oregon doesn’t go to the NCAA Tournament, they won’t go anywhere. Not even the NIT.

When practice resumed Tuesday, the Ducks wore gym clothes instead of uniforms. Coaches wouldn’t allow them to wear any Oregon apparel.
“We were given the instruction that we shouldn’t be wearing Oregon gear if we’re not going to represent the University well, but we were told we could wear them today,” forward Brianne Meharry said.
“I thought she was going about trying to motivate us all wrong,” Wolvert said. “I don’t agree with anything that she said, and I just think there are better ways to help our team than to take away things from us that we’ve more than earned, I feel.”
But players and coaches are trying to see eye-to-eye with each other. Immediately following Tuesday’s practice, Runge called for a players and coaches meeting beneath Mac Court.
“We talked about goals and things that they felt like they could do better,” Runge said. “It wasn’t a big deal. It was just talking about setting goals. It wasn’t like brain surgery or anything.”
But several players weren’t satisfied with what was accomplished at the meeting.
“We had a psychologist down there trying to teach us breathing techniques,” Dion said. “Which, personally, that’s not going to do a lot for me in one session. I don’t know how much we got out of it. People took from it what they thought they needed to hear.”

The stretch run
When the Ducks first started losing, Dion struggled to put the team’s problem into words.
Now, she sums it up pretty well.
“At first, we thought it was just a temporary setback,” Dion said. “None of us have come from programs that lost very much, if at all. So here we are in this predicament, and we thought it was just a minor thing, and it turned into something worse and it just kind of snowballs from there.
“Initially, no one knew how to react. It’s exhausting to think about all the time. It just got worse and worse and worse; obviously our record shows that. We [seniors] have really backed ourselves into a corner now, and we want to leave a good mark here.”
A third Pac-10 Championship may be nothing more than a dream for Oregon, but the Big Dance is more than within reach. And the Duck seniors could still leave a mark on their program by leading their team past the first or second round of the NCAA Tournament.
But first, Oregon needs to regroup, then rediscover its winning ways.
“We’ve had such tremendous success in the past,” Dion said. “We don’t want to go out like this. We’re doing our best to turn things around.”