ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - In a blustery one-word postgame admission, more shrug than press-conference answer, Gail Goestenkors blurted out the single-word curse and the single-word blessing of her No. 5 Blue Devils.
"Youth," she said, somewhere between exasperation and frustration. "We're just a young ballclub."
Sure, they were tournament champions, and sure they had won both games handily-a 28-point romp over UCLA and an 11-point win over No. 7 Louisiana State-but like the rugged New Mexico landscape that surrounds The Pit, the host arena for this weekend's Women's Sports Foundation Classic, they were two games more a testament to survival than basketball aesthetics.
Two games, five freshmen, 46 turnovers, half a dozen aspirin for Goestenkors.
Nobody ever said the road to the top was an easy one.
"[It is] simply unacceptable," Goestenkors said after the team's opening round 80-52 turnover-fest win against the UCLA Bruins. "We simply can't play that irresponsibly."
An aggressive UCLA defense kept the Blue Devils on their heels, and in their first look at real game pressure, kept the Blue Devils cycling the ball back into Bruin hands.
Goestenkors cycled players into the game in waves-partially to offset the pressures of playing back-to-back games and partially to deal with Albuquerque's mile-high altitude-and they turned the ball over in waves.
"We just didn't make good decisions out there," Goestenkors said. "Our execution just isn't there."
And the problem wasn't
Of the Blue Devils' 30 turnovers, 16 belonged to Duke returnees. It was not that Duke was bad, it is just that on opening night, they looked every bit like the rookie team that they are.
And they were still a force even 30 turnovers and a sloppy offense could not knock off track.
"We were able to pressure them into a lot of mistakes," UCLA coach Kathy Olivier said. "But they're a massively talented team, a deep team."
Saturday, the rematch with LSU-which had monopolized pre-tournament interest in the matchup-materialized, but the effortless Duke offense the team displayed during a pair of exhibition wins never did.
Yet with the most talented Duke club Goestenkors has had, it still did not matter.
The Blue Devils turned the ball over 16 times against the Tigers-12 times in the second half alone-and shot just 33 percent from the floor. Still, they walked away with an 11-point win over the nation's No. 7 team in a game that was never in question.
"I'm happy to come away with a win," Goestenkors said. "We did a good job of making things work."
With LSU coach Sue Gunter-women's college basketball's answer to Bobby Cremins, with the trademark mop of floppy grey hair bobbing up and down wildly on the sidelines-parading on the sideline from the slew of mistakes her team was forced into, the Duke defense took over when the offense could not.
"We pride ourselves on defense; things start on defense," senior captain Georgia Schweitzer said. "It was good to see we can rely on defense and win."
Despite playing a less aggressive defense than they had the night before, the Blue Devils forced LSU into 14 first-half turnovers, a defensive dominance that more than offset Duke's offensive misfires.
The Blue Devils shot just 26 percent in the opening half, making only 1-of-17 shots over an eight-minute stretch late in the half. But solid defense, combined with a much-improved half of ball control (four turnovers in the half) and an offense markedly more fluid than the night before, kept the Tigers at bay.
"We did enough good things that I'm not worried," Goestenkors said. "Our shots weren't falling, but we've got plenty of scorers. We'll be fine."
But just when it looked like Duke had already grown out of its ball control problem, LSU stepped up the defensive pressure and the Blue Devils almost let the Tigers back into the game, tossing the ball away a dozen times, almost exclusively in the final seven minutes.
"Sometimes you have to lose a game to learn about yourself," said Goestenkors, who won her season opener for the eighth time in nine seasons. "Tonight was a good game for us because we learned lessons without having to lose."
But with a lot of growing left to do, it is hard to imagine that the Blue Devils could have a better place to start.
"We're a young team, we're going to grow and improve," Goestenkors said. "We don't want to start the year as the best team we can be, we want to end it the best we can be."
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