COLUMN: Re-energized Southeast women reply to new low with first conference win

I don't think there is a coach alive who cares more about his basketball program than Ty Margenthaler.

There are undoubtedly many coaches who equal the Southeast Missouri State women's basketball coach's passion and desire, but it would frankly be impossible to surpass him.

He feels every up and down and, for better or worse, it shows. It shows in a thousand animated gestures on the sideline each game, it shows in nearly every word he speaks about his team and it shows in the way he doggedly continues to try to improve with few rewards to this point.

"I'm into it every minute, every second," Margenthaler said after his team's first Ohio Valley Conference win of the season in six tries on Saturday. "I care about this program, I care about this university. I want to turn this thing around. I care about about these young ladies, and it hurts me like there's no tomorrow. And again, that's just in me. I'm happy for them because they're the ones that really deserve to get this off their back and move on. We've still got a big, big hill to climb, but I think it's a hill we can get to."

The hill Margenthaler and the Redhawks faced entering Saturday's match never seemed taller. Southeast was off to its worst start ever in the OVC and coming off a thorough 70-34 trouncing at the hands of Jacksonville State on Wednesday.

That the Redhawks returned home to record a win after that type of setback was nice, even if it came against a Tennessee Tech team with five wins, particularly because two of those were OVC victories.

But I was struck far more by how the Redhawks began the game than how they finished it. From the start Southeast had a notable increase in enthusiasm. An early dive to the court, for example, drew a standing ovation from the entire bench.

I couldn't help but wonder how the most encouraging start to a game I've seen this season came after the most demoralizing loss.

"I think the big thing was that we brought energy every single day before this game in practice," forward Erin Bollmann said. "... We carried it over. That's when we were making shots, making layups -- everything. Once we can carry that over, then we can start winning games."

Bollmann started a game for the first time this season and helped the Redhawks jump out to an early lead they were able to cling to at the end and force overtime.

"With the diving for balls and everything, we were doing that in practice," Bollmann said. "We used to not do that in practice. We just let it go, so now that we're trying our butts off, the bench is in it, when we come off the floor we're hitting everybody's hands instead of being down and looking down. And it's just contagious. ... When somebody else is up, I'm up. It's great. I love it."

To be fair, a lack of enthusiasm has hardly been to blame for the Redhawks' losses and it of course would have been better if the diving and the winning had started weeks ago.

But there's no returning to the past to get those games back, so it was refreshing to see to a team face its issues and -- at least for a night -- vanquish its demons.

Even when the lead slipped away and that here-we-go-again feeling started to sink in as the teams headed to overtime, Bollmann and her teammates found some belief.

"Right before overtime me and [Jasmine Robinson] were walking out and I'm like, 'Look at them, they're tired. They look tired, and we're sitting here all pumped up. We're yelling, we're screaming. Nobody's sitting down.' That's when I got it in my head. I'm like, 'We're about to win this because we all are in this and they just look like they're beaten up. We have been tough the entire time, and they look like they just got beaten down.'"

The Redhawks and Margenthaler have taken their share of beatings this year. I'm not much more winning they'll be able to do, but they'll have their opportunities in a league that has few powerhouse programs.

"It was a heck of a basketball game I thought for 45 minutes, and it took every minute of that to get that win, but I was really pleased," Margenthaler said. "It was definitely a win that we needed in the worst way. Again I think that shows right there [that] this basketball team is fighting. They haven't given in. They want it really, really bad."

The truth is that isn't always enough -- for coaches or for players -- but it's always appreciated and always helps.