No. 19 Iowa State women hope to end three-game skid Wednesday at Colorado

AMES — There are few, if any, women’s college basketball players more versatile than Iowa State’s Addy Brown.

She leads the No. 19 Cyclones in rebounding. She ranks second in both scoring and assists. And now she’s out indefinitely with what is being officially termed a lower body injury, so she’s shifting into assistant coach mode as ISU (14-3, 2-3) seeks to beat Colorado (11-6, 2-3) at 8 p.m. Wednesday in Boulder.

“She loves to play and you only have a finite amount of time in your life where you get to be a college basketball player,” Cyclone head coach Bill Fennelly said of Brown, who started in each of first 83 games of her college career before missing the past three. “And obviously some of those opportunities won’t be there anymore, but she wants to be a coach. Now she gets to coach.”

It’s uncertain if Brown can return this season. That’s not the case with ISU’s top on-ball defender, Arianna Jackson, who suffered a scary knee injury in last week’s loss at Cincinnati, but is likely to return at some point well down the road. Jackson — who Fennelly routinely calls his team’s smartest player — also can help coach up the team, which aims to end a three-game skid Wednesday.

“We got two really big curveballs in Addy Brown and ‘AJ,’” said Cyclone star center Audi Crooks, who leads the nation in scoring at 28.3 points per game. “They’re key staples for us on this team, but there’s no use on harping on what we don’t have. We’ve gotta focus on what we do (have), so moving forward, I think it’s being more intentional. It’s slowing things down in practice for the people who don’t have as much experience to understand, and, hopefully, we can put out a better product on the floor.”

Brown’s and Jackson’s prolonged absences will allow opponents to commit even more resources to stopping Crooks, who has been double-teamed and triple-teamed often in the past few games. That’s nothing new, of course, but it has been more intense, so players filling in with more playing time such as Reagan Wilson and Sydney Harris must be efficient scorers on the perimeter — and they both were in Sunday’s loss at home to West Virginia. Wilson went 3-for-5 from long range in that game and Harris went 3-for-6 from beyond the arc.

“Hopefully that continues,” said Crooks, who went 8-for-9 from the floor against the Mountaineers. “If that happens, that will continue to take some of the stress off of me and I won’t have to (try to) pour in 40.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It does feel wrong for Brown and Jackson to be relegated to the sidelines for the foreseeable future, though, but they’re doing everything they can to mentor the players who are seeing a rapid rise in minutes.

“They’re great teammates,” junior forward Alisa Williams said. “They encourage us. They believe in us and we’re glad to have them.”

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