At Wednesday night’s press conference following the 82-38 loss to Connecticut, Syracuse point guard Julie McBride summed up the current state of the SU women’s basketball team. She spoke positively, but she easily could have dwelled on the negatives.

The Orangewomen sit in 12th place in the 14-team Big East, losers of seven straight games. The last time Syracuse won was nearly a month ago on Jan. 17, when it beat Providence, 55-50. Then, Syracuse was off to one of its best conference starts in a decade at 3-1, including 2-0 on the road.

Now, Syracuse is coming off the worst loss of the season, a 44-point defeat to the defending national champion Huskies. The Orangewomen are 6-15 overall and 3-8 in the Big East as they travel to face Seton Hall (13-8, 5-5 Big East) at Walsh Gymnasium on Saturday at 2 p.m.

Syracuse currently occupies the last spot eligible to qualify for the conference tournament. The top 12 teams make it, while the bottom two sulk at home, and Syracuse only has a faint grasp on that position.

But McBride is still happy, even if the possibility remains that Syracuse could be one of the two teams watching the Big East Tournament, rather than playing in it.

‘This is the situation we’ve dealt with, and we’ve got to deal with it,’ McBride said. ‘The bright spot is that if you love basketball, you’re just going to come out every day and play it. That’s the bright spot, because every day is a new day.’

Syracuse could shore up its position with one more conference win. Providence is in last place at 0-10 in conference. Pittsburgh, which Syracuse beat earlier this year by 20, is in 13th place with two conference wins. If Pittsburgh somehow caught fire over its last five games and knocked off two opponents, Syracuse would be out of luck for the tournament.

Syracuse could make all of this moot with one conference win.

The Seton Hall game on Saturday night and another road game at Georgetown on Feb. 25 are the best chances for Syracuse to get that win.

The Pirates, though, are an example that even the mediocre teams can take down the conference elite. Sunday, Seton Hall knocked off No. 23 Notre Dame, 51-45. It was the first time since 1994 that SHU beat a ranked team.

A more startling fact for Syracuse is that it was only the second time Seton Hall has been outrebounded, and Notre Dame only did that by a 37-36 margin. Opponents are outrebounding Syracuse by 10.9 boards a game while the Pirates outrebound their foes by nine.

Junior forward Ashley Bush is the only Pirate averaging double digits in points with 10.2. She’s also the team’s leading rebounder with 6.2 boards a game.

If Syracuse wants to defeat Seton Hall, the first place it might want to improve is offensively. Syracuse is averaging only 39.7 points over its past three games and only 44.7 during its current seven-game losing streak.

For what it’s worth, while the offense continues to struggle, McBride feels SU’s defense is continuing to improve, despite allowing the Huskies 82 points.

‘I think our defense is getting a lot better,’ McBride said. ‘For what we have, we’re doing an awesome job. My teammates are working so hard. I think our defense is improving every day. If we can just keep doing that, we can keep going up. For next year and the year after that, this is what’s going to help them.’

The key emphasis, for now, though remains on qualifying for the tournament – although next year isn’t too far off, either.

Published on February 12, 2004 at 12:00 pm