No. 10 Iowa State seeks 15th straight win Sunday against No. 22 Baylor

AMES — It might have been the first practice. Or maybe the second or third. But whatever the timing, Iowa State women’s basketball coach Bill Fennelly’s preseason message to his team proved to be both jarring and inspiring.

“I told our players at the beginning of the year that there is not one single game that we shouldn’t feel like we can win,” said Fennelly, whose 10th-ranked Cyclones (14-0, 2-0) have done nothing but win entering Sunday’s 2 p.m. matchup with No. 22 Baylor (12-3, 1-1) at Hilton Coliseum.

Then ISU’s veteran head coach added a caveat.

“There (are) going to be a bunch of them that if we don’t play well, we’re gonna lose,” Fennelly said.

Facing the tradition-rich and physically-imposing Bears always falls into that latter category. The Cyclones lost twice to them last season and one common denominator shaded both of those setbacks.

“There’s a difference between not playing well, or the other team playing better, and the other team just imposing (its) will on you,” Fennelly said. “And Baylor did that to us twice.”

That reality sent another message to ISU’s junior-laden team — and it was fully absorbed.

“We’ve gotta throw the first punch,” said Cyclone guard Arianna Jackson, who, like teammate Kenzie Hare, is shooting 50 percent from 3-point range. “We’ve gotta come out hard. We can’t come out flat.”

The Bears feature an elite scorer in transfer Taliah Scott (21.0 points per game), and a pair of veteran team players in Bella Fontleroy and Darianna Littlepage-Buggs. Fontleroy leads the Bears in steals with 25. Littlepage-Buggs leads the team in rebounds with 10.0 per game.

“Buggs and Fontleroy are the kind of players that have always given us trouble,” Fennelly said. “They’re long. They’re athletic. … Those are the kind of kids that every team wants and very few teams have.”

But Fennelly’s team fields the nation’s leading scorer, Audi Crooks. The 6-3 junior from Algona has scored 30-plus points in five consecutive games and is averaging 29.4 points per game on 72.5 percent field goal shooting. So she’ll get hers while the skilled players around her such as Addy Brown, Jada Williams and Jackson, among others, ably fill in needed gaps on both ends of the floor.

In short, the Cyclones aren’t merely one star and everyone else — and that’s why they’re one win away from starting 15-0 for the first time in program history.

“If someone’s not doing well, somebody else can pick the other person up,” said backup forward Alisa Williams said. “It takes everybody.”

That mentality — along with a deep and talented roster — is what led Fennelly to make that preseason pronouncement.

“I do think we’re more prepared for this kind of game than we were last year,” Fennelly said. “There’s no question about that. Whether or not we do anything about it, that’s a whole ‘nother story.”

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