Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Wright State women’s basketball coach Katrina Merriweather has all five starters back after going 25-9 last season and more quality players on the bench than the program has had in years. That’s why there’s plenty of buzz about the potential of her team.
But until she sees it materialize on the floor, Merriweather wants to pump the brakes on talk about what the Raiders might accomplish this year.
“I agree there’s a lot of potential. But what we always talk about is that potential is a word that someone came up with for ‘haven’t done anything yet.’ So, we’re working toward reaching that potential as soon as possible,” she said.
The Raiders will get cracking on that objective when they kick off the season at 6 p.m. Friday at Northwestern (Ohio), a 10-year-old NAIA program from Lima that finished 13-18 last season.
Playing a lower-division foe on the road may seem like a peculiar opener for a team coming off its first Horizon League regular-season title, but the Nutter Center is booked on the opening weekend of college basketball every year with state high school volleyball, and Merriweather didn’t want to sit idle — nor take on a top-tier opponent with so many challenges ahead.
“Our schedule is really, really tough. We’ve got Missouri, Georgia, Stetson, Providence, Richmond. … Since we had to go on the road, and I definitely wanted us to play on the opening weekend, that turned out to be our best option at the time,” she said.
