As a freshman, forward Brittany Orban has to carry the older players’ bags into the gym before every game, but that is hardly an indicator of where she stands on the team.
Despite her youth, Orban has started 18 straight games since mid-November.
Initially, Orban mostly had been a second or third scoring option. That changed three games ago. In NU’s 74-46 road loss to Iowa, Orban tied her career high of 13 points to lead the Wildcats (5-15, 1-8 Big Ten) in scoring.
Two games later, in a 43-40 loss at Minnesota on Sunday, she led the team in scoring with 13 points.
“When you get 13 points in a game that’s 41-40, that’s like getting 25 in a regular game,” coach Joe McKeown said.
McKeown isn’t used to playing freshmen much, having spent the past 19 seasons at perennial NCAA tournament participant George Washington.
But with a new school come new players, none of whom know the system. Ironically, NU’s freshmen – Orban and the Mocchi twins, Maggie and Allison – may have had a jumpstart on the rest of the team since they didn’t have to forget the system of previous coach Beth Combs before learning McKeown’s.
“We were all basically starting out as freshmen in (McKeown’s) standpoint,” Orban said.
All three were Combs’s recruits whom McKeown inherited, although he said acclimating to them hasn’t been the biggest adjustment.
“I think they have adjusted well to me, because I’m not the coach that recruited them; I’m not the one that saw them play in high school and said, ‘We want you to come to Northwestern,'” McKeown said. “I’m the one who’s coming in and saying, ‘You’ve got to do this, this and that.’ I think they’ve really accepted the demands I’ve made on them really well.”
Those demands haven’t always been so tough as they are now for Orban. McKeown did cut her some slack early on, she said, to allow her to become accustomed to college life. But since the season started, she has shown she doesn’t need it anymore.
“As we progress, the expectations for her become a little bit more demanding, because we’ve got a better feel of what she can handle from what she’s learned and absorbed so far,” McKeown said. “So now we’re kind of holding her a little more accountable.”
McKeown doesn’t expect Orban’s starting streak to end anytime soon, meaning the 19-year-old again will lug the team’s bags into Welsh-Ryan Arena for Thursday night’s game against Illinois (5-16, 1-9) as a lowly freshman. But she will step onto the court at tip-off as a seasoned starter.
“When we sit down and evaluate the whole year, I think we’ll walk away and say, ‘There weren’t that many freshmen in the Big Ten that had a better year than her,'” McKeown said.
