Arkansas set to close out 2023 with Incarnate Word on Sunday afternoon

BY DUDLEY E. DAWSON The best way to end 2023 and start 2024 is with a win and that’s just what the Razorback women’s basketball team will try and do on New Year’s Eve afternoon. Arkansas (11-3) will host Incarnate Word (7-3) Sunday at 1 p.

m. at Bud Walton Arena in a contest that will be televised by the SEC Network +. The Razorbacks will take a three-game winning streak into their first game in 10 days and will trying to win a 12th pre-conference game for the second straight season.

Incarnate Word, which has won six of its last seven games, lost at No. 23 TCU (61-55) earlier this season and also has losses at Texas Tech (76-34) and to visiting New Mexico State (59-52) this season under head coach Jeff Dowe. Dowe, who is in his 34th collegiate campaign and his fifth at Incarnate Word, a program he led his team to the Southland Conference title and the NCAA Tournament in the 2021-2022 season.

“Jeff does a tremendous job with his kids,” Neighbors said. He’s played Texas Tech, he’s played TCU. One of the games was very, very close in the third quarter.

Texas Tech kind of got away from them, but the TCU was close all the way. They’re not afraid to go out and play. They played in front of 13,000 at Texas Tech.

Hopefully we’ll have a good crowd. I don’t think we’ll have 13,000…The team will not be intimidated. ” Arkansas will open SEC action at Kentucky’s Rupp Arena on Thursday after playing all of the15 non-conference games allowed by the NCAA.

“That’s the max,” Neighbors said. “I just read a report yesterday that there are only eight teams in the country whose NET wins are better than ours. “They are UConn, Stanford, Iowa State, North Carolina State, Gonzaga, Creighton and Princeton.

They are the only ones ahead of us if you take the teams we have wins against. We are ninth in the country even with the challenges of playing your in-state schools, going on the road to play and some neutral site games. “If my players down there (on the court) found out that the NCAA allowed you to play 15 non-conference games and we only played 13, there would be a mutiny.

They want to play the most games they can play. Games are fun. They want to play.

“…The games are the test. Practices are good and there’s nobody here to judge what we’re doing. Every now and then we have somebody wonder in, but games are the hardest thing to do.

I think we have to test them. ” San Antonio-based Incarnate Word was picked fourth in the Southland Conference preseason poll and is led by Nina De Leon Negro, a second team all-conference selection last season, and leading scorer Aliyah Collins (10. 9).

“A lot of scheduling comes from people I know in the game and respect and Jeff is a guy that was really nice to me when I was coming up,” Neighbors said. “He was an assistant coach at a lot of different places and I would see him at a lot of different places open the road. I would just gravitate toward him.

He has been somebody who I just respect the way he does things. “We tried to get a game with them when we had (former Razorback) Amber Ramirez here. We tried to take her home.

We reached out then, but we just couldn’t find a date. It wasn’t their fault, wasn’t our fault, we just couldn’t find a date to get her home. Arkansas has gotten both Ramirez and fellow former Razorback and WNBA player Chelsea Dungee out of San Antonio.

“…That’s an area that we recruit a lot,” Neighbors said. “San Antonio is kind of a hot bed for us. We have got relationships with the high school coaches there.

We have proven it with Amber and even though Chelsea wasn’t from there, she played out of a for (AAU) program there. We recruit that area a lot so that’s the reason. ” Butch Rea, Neighbors’ son-in-law, is an assistant baseball coach at Incarnate Word and lives in San Antonio with Neighbors’ daughter Abby and grand daughter Emzey.

“And it is not because my son in law is now a baseball coach there,” Neighbors said. “That happened well after. Y’all can (check the) Freedom of Information Act on the day we signed the contract.

But my son in law is now a baseball coach there with my grand baby down there. ” Incarnate Word does not play a fast tempo per Neighbors. “They play a fun style,” Neighbors said.

“They don’t play very fast. It is typically a grind-it-out game against them. One of the slower paces in the country, so we’ll have to do a lot of things to get the tempo the way we prefer it.

“But if we can’t establish that, then we have to play at different paces. That helps us when it comes league time as well. “Gives us a variety of opponents and I know that a team coached by Jeff is going to come in here well prepared.

They are going to execute their stuff and give us some wrinkles that are going to help us the rest of the way out. The Razorbacks were last action in the West Palm Beach Classic on Dec. 20-21 while downing Illinois 60-59 – on Maryam Dauda’s buzzer-beating lay up off Samara Spencer’s assist – and the University of Illinois-Chicago 66-58 with freshman and SEC leading scorer Taliah Scott having 24 points.

“You saw some things that happened during the course of the game that were good signs for us,” Neighbors said. “Saw Taliah get on a hot streak and we had players starting to look for her. There were times earlier in the year when we didn’t do that.

“We had four of five really good clips where people were starting to trust each other. We had Sam driving it to the basket to win the game, get stopped and trust Maryam with the dump off pass and we didn’t always have that. You don’t always have that earlier in the year and you are starting to se that.

“It carried over into that second game when you had the opportunity to be distracted against UIC. Everybody was leaving from down there and most people weren’t getting on the plane with us. Had to get their bags pack, Christmas shopping…There were a lot of reasons we could have been distracted for the game against UIC, but we didn’t.

“ Neioghbors thinks both wins will help Arkansas down the line. “There are a lot of really good things that happened,” Neighbors said. “I think Illinois [will be] a quality win later in the year when we see how they end up doing.

It’s a team that started out ranked in the polls and were picked in the top five for that league. “They (the Illini), like us, have played a challenging schedule. I don’t know how they’ll end up in their league, but I think that’s a good win for us.

I also think UIC is a team that’ll be in a tournament. I don’t know which tournament, but they’ll be in the postseason. So, we played pretty good.

We had good chemistry-building moments. ” Photo by John D. James.