Tanya Warren has quietly built her
Northern Iowa Panthers women’s basketball team into a perennial contender in the Missouri Valley Conference. Warren’s teams have won 12 or more conference games in each of the last six seasons, and have reached the postseason in nine of the last 10.
Warren is the program’s all-time winningest coach, and in April she received a contract extension through 2024-25 for her success in Cedar Falls. Despite finishing among the upper ranks of the MVC consistently over Warren’s 12 seasons as head coach, the Panthers have not made the NCAA Tournament as an automatic qualifier since 2010-11, with one at-large bid in 2016-17.
The program as a whole has been successful over Warren’s tenure, but the Panthers have higher aspirations than their past second and third-place finishes. With teams like
Drake and
Missouri State garnering national recognition in recent years, the Panthers have put together solid season after solid season, and it is only a matter of time before their window reopens and they return to the Big Dance.
Despite a decent amount of turnover from last season, this might be their year. One player who will be crucial to any breakthrough for UNI is junior
Karli Rucker. The Eldridge, Iowa native quickly developed from a bench option who averaged just 4.2 points per game as a freshman, into a first-team All-MVC guard averaging 15.0 points and 3.8 assists per game.
Rucker did a little bit of everything last season, leading UNI in total points, assists, and rebounds, and she also shot 81.9 percent from the free-throw line. Her rise and all-around skillset could be enough to push the Panthers back into the NCAA Tournament, especially if she can continue to grow as a player.
Rucker will lead a young backcourt for the Panthers, with UNI’s other four returning guards combining for just 16 starts a year ago. A key reinforcement at the guard position will be graduate transfer
Kristina Cavey from
Fresno State. As a graduate transfer, Cavey will be immediately eligible for the Panthers and will provide much-needed experience.
Cavey has played 88 games in her collegiate career and has totaled 548 points, which is just over six points per contest. The graduate started 19 games last year for the Bulldogs, averaging 5.6 points per game.
She had a strong start to her sophomore season in 2017-18 and was a starter for Fresno State before suffering a wrist injury that forced her to miss eight games. Despite the injury, Cavey returned and finished with 9.1 points per game in just 21.5 minutes per contest.
Other notable returning players for Warren and the Panthers are redshirt-junior forward
Megan Maahs, who missed all but eight games last season with an injury, and
Cynthia Wolf, a 6-foot-3 sophomore who displayed solid shooting from beyond the arc (34.3 percent) despite being a center.
In 2017-18, Maahs led UNI in scoring average (10.4 points per game), rebounding average (9.8 per game), and blocks (29), and recorded 12 double-doubles. If the redshirt-junior can return to that level of production coming off of her injury, containing Maahs will be a very difficult task for post players across the MVC.
One trend last season was UNI’s high rate of shots from beyond the arc. About 38 percent of scoring attempts (field goal attempts and free throw trips) by the Panthers were three-pointers, the
23rd-highest rate in the NCAA last season, and a player like Wolf can be a nightmare to guard with her threat of inside and outside scoring.
Joining Maahs and Wolf in the frontcourt are senior
Heidi Hillyard, redshirt-freshman Kiana Barney, and freshmen Kaitlin Winston and Sara McCollough.
Another key stat for the Panthers is their opponents’ assisted shot rate. In conference play, UNI’s opponents only assisted on 43.3 percent of made field goals, which was the
best in the MVC. A defense that restricts easy passes like UNI’s could give a team like Drake, who thrives when everyone is freely distributing the ball, difficulties if they don’t adjust.
That stat is indicative of the defensive system run by Warren’s teams, and not any single player, because the Panthers have allowed the fewest assists per game in conference play in each of the last four seasons.
The window is open for the Panthers in 2019-20, and the MVC is more wide open than it has been in several years. The daunting conference winning-streak Drake had strung together is now gone, Missouri State’s leading scorer Danielle Gitzen has graduated, and the Panthers just might have enough x-factor and the right playing style to take advantage.