Coming off her lowest-scoring game of the season, Yarden Garzon had a career-high 23 points. What makes the career night even better, it was Garzon’s birthday.
“She needed a game like tonight where she could see that thing go in, and it just happened to be her birthday,” Indiana head coach Teri Moren said.
Garzon’s five 3s made, which tied her career-high, helped lead the 21st-ranked Hoosiers to a dominant 71-57 win over the 19th-ranked Tennessee Lady Volunteers.
In a first half where neither team could find a rhythm offensively, it was the play of Garzon that allowed the Hoosiers to remain on top. She accounted for 16 of Indiana’s 33 points.
Garzon knocked down four of her five shots from 3-point range to finish the first half. She went on to hit one more to finish the game with five 3s. Mackenzie Holmes and Garzon were seen smirking up the floor after Garzon’s last one.
“I think, you know, just trying to have a little bit of fun but also when she was shooting at the clip she was shooting it, it was hard not to smile,” Holmes said.
Another thing the Hoosiers can be happy about is their play on the defensive side of the ball. They held the Lady Vols to a season-low 57 points. Moren attributed their toughness on defense to playing to the level the players know they are capable of playing at.
Moren said the Stanford loss embarrassed the players because they knew they could compete at the highest level. Thursday’s victory showed the Hoosiers weren’t going to let their 32-point loss to the Cardinal define them.
“They wanted to show up and prove to themselves more than anything that they were better than what we showed in our performance at Stanford,” Moren said.
Their toughness was apparent in the game and it seemed like the Hoosiers were starting to approach the game with the intensity level that Moren and the coaching staff have been demanding out of them.
Things do not get much easier for the Hoosiers as they play a talented Princeton team next. The Tigers beat the 22nd-ranked Oklahoma Sooners by 14 on Thursday. This win should not come as a surprise however because Princeton lost at second-ranked UCLA by only three points earlier this season.
Indiana is familiar with the Tigers as they played them in the second round of the 2022 NCAA tournament. The Hoosiers scraped by with a one-point victory in front of a raucous crowd at Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall.
With all this in mind, Indiana is not letting the intensity of this game escape them.
“They certainly and they always have had our attention. We know how talented they are,” Moren said.
The Hoosiers will take on Princeton on Saturday at 11 a.m. EST to close out their Florida trip.
