For most of her collegiate career, Southwestern women's basketball player Noel Pratts preferred the solitude of an empty gym when it came time to put in her work.
Through her first two seasons, Pratts would wheel out the shooting gun—a machine that rebounds shots into a giant net and then passes the ball—to get her practice in alone.
"I just liked to get my shots up with no distractions," Pratts says.
Last year, Pratts met a teammate who loved the gym as much as she did: sharpshooting guard Lauren Fulenwider.
"Lauren came in, and she can shoot the ball like no one else. It's ridiculous," Pratts recalls. "And she's the type who always wants to have someone go shoot with her. One day, in the training room, she talked me into shooting with her, and from there, it turned into a routine for us."
Pratts, the better athlete and more dynamic attacker off the bounce, helped Fulenwider develop her drives to the rim. Fulenwider, one of the five purest shooters in all of Division III, helped Pratts with her shot. Practices turned into friendly competitions, seeing who could make 10 shots in a row first or any number of other feats.
"They were best friends on the team, and they were in the gym together all the time," Head Women's Basketball Coach Greta Grothe says. "And when you have that trust on and off the floor, it translates to the game."
That bond of familiarity helped guide a season where everything was unfamiliar. Southwestern's 17-person roster featured 10 new players, including nine first-years. The coaches were implementing a different style of play to fit its new personnel. And they were trying to do it all amidst a global pandemic that limited time together and cut the number of games by two-thirds.
The team bonded over summer reading and went back to basics during practices, doing its best to mimic normalcy with the pandemic ever-present.
"It was definitely an adjustment," Pratts says. "We never knew if we were going to be shut down. Every week, we'd have COVID testing, and there'd be anticipation over whether we'd be cleared to play. I kept reminding the team it wasn't always going to be like this. We just tried to remain positive and keep a good environment."
Getting to the season opener and being the first program to return to competition was a victory in itself. The night, however, didn't end with a win in the boxscore. Southwestern showed its inexperience with a barrage of turnovers and at-times-reluctant shooting in a 56-53 loss to Schreiner. It also flexed its resiliency, making a fourth-quarter push to give itself a chance to tie the game with a last-second shot.
It was a theme Southwestern carried through for most of the season, making youthful mistakes to dig a hole and showing enough resiliency to almost climb its way out of it. It was an effort that belied the team's 2-7 record.
"I know our record didn't reflect it, but when things were thrown our way, we were able to stay positive in a situation where there wasn't a lot of positivity," Grothe says. "We were down in a lot of games but fought back to win or make it really close. We never gave up. That's what we learned about ourselves and what I'm looking forward to next season."
The team played Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) powerhouse Austin College, getting a school-record eight 3-pointers from Fulenwider in a loss that once again came down to the final shot. Despite an 0-4 start, the team seemed to be finding its footing heading into a weekend road back-to-back against Colorado College.
Some of the improvement came via a Pratt epiphany during a weekly Tuesday film session with Grothe.
"Every time I drove, the defense collapsed on me, and I was taking tough shots to finish," Pratts recalls. "She pointed out how I could make things easier on myself by kicking it out. Those tougher shots were still available later in the shot clock. I didn't understand it until I saw it on film."
Pratts averaged 3.4 assists per game, more than doubling her average from the previous two seasons. The newfound playmaking ability kept defenses honest, opening the driving lanes needed to average a career-high 14.0 points per game and earn All-SCAC Third Team.
"This was Noel's best year. She stepped up huge for us in a lot of games," Grothe says. "She was more levelheaded than she's been, trusting her teammates, and didn't get down."
That maturity showed in the first game against Colorado College, in which Pratts led the team to a 65-58 victory to hand the Tigers their first loss, scoring a season-high 19 points on an efficient 9-for-15 shooting while playing an active part in a strong Southwestern defensive performance.
"It was an awesome moment. We played very well against Austin College but didn't come away with a win," Grothe says. "That first Colorado College game, everything came together."
"I remember going into the auxiliary gym where [Colorado College] put us after the game, and everyone is freaking out, and I'm screaming my head off," Fulenwider recalls. "Then we did our normal victory routine where we all get quiet right before coach comes in, then scream."
"I felt that was the boost we needed," Pratts says. "We got a feel for what it is to beat a good team, and everyone fell into their roles."
Taylor Carney continued her transformation from floor-spacing gunner to defensive menace, using her length and activity to disrupt drives and defend post players, and Reece Sandercock provided rebounding and secondary scoring.
Erin Toro continued her steady brand of defense across multiple positions and heady play. At the same time, point guard Emily Edwards showed maturity in handling the ups and downs of running the offense at basketball's most demanding position as a first-year. Off the bench, Princess Roberts provided bone-crunching screens and Emma Lewis some shooting off the bench.
And Fulenwider rained fire on the SCAC.
The junior guard led the league in scoring, averaging 16.2 points per game, finishing second in the nation in 3-pointers made per game (4.0) and third in total 3-pointers made (44) at a 35.5 percent clip to earn First Team All-SCAC.
"First and foremost, she's the hardest-working player I've had in my four years at Southwestern," Grothe says. "She works the hardest in every single practice, and it shows on game day."
Midway through the season, the chemistry Pratts and Fulenwider developed working out together began to translate to games, with Fulenwider's outside shooting balancing Pratts's forays to the rim.
"There was this unspoken connection where we knew when and where to get the ball to each other in certain situations," Pratts says.
"A good part of it was making sure our chemistry was great off the court," Fulenwider adds. "We got a better feel for each other on the court."
The connection paid off in, perhaps, the most improbable win of Grothe's tenure in a 48-45 victory over Texas Lutheran. The game seemed to exaggerate the best and worst of Southwestern's season, starting with the latter, when the Pirates shot 0-for-15 with three turnovers in a scoreless first quarter to fall behind by 13.
"I've never been through anything like that," Grothe says. "We were missing layups. It was crazy, but to not put our heads down and come back said a lot about how our season was."
"It was so surreal. I was thinking, 'Man, we're really not going to get a bucket this entire quarter,'" Fulenwider recalls. "We all just looked at each other in the huddle and said, 'OK, that happened. Let's go score some points.'"
"Coach preaches one quarter at a time, and that's the mindset we had," Pratts adds.
The team pulled itself back and put itself in position for another last-minute opportunity. With defenders keying on Fulenwider, Grothe put the ball in Pratts's hands to draw the defense's attention while Toro set a screen to spring Fulenwider free to nail the game-winner.
"Pressure is a privilege," Fulenwider says. "To have my team and coach believe in me gave me the confidence to hit that shot. So I have to credit Grothe for drawing up a great play, Noel for drawing the attention, and Erin for setting a great screen. At that point, it was just hitting a wide-open shot."
"To not score in a quarter, your confidence should be gone, but for some reason, we kept our composure and stuck to the game plan," she adds. "It really was a microcosm of the season."
The momentum the team gathered from wins against Colorado College and Texas Lutheran was brought to a crashing halt when winter storms canceled the final two weeks of the regular season. "It was frustrating to have gone through the entire season without any COVID problems and then have the weather be the thing to cancel our game," Fulenwider recalls.
When the team returned after a month off, it was for the first round of the SCAC Championship Tournament against a tough matchup with Trinity. The Tigers buried Southwestern with a full-court press it hadn't had an opportunity to face to prepare its young guards for defensive pressure they'd never encountered before.
"The winter storms hurt us. We were in a great rhythm," Grothe says. "We were getting better every day and starting to see results before the storm hit, and we just never got that consistency back."
Although the season suffered so many cancellations and uncertainties, the women's basketball team managed to build some foundations. Pratts might be moving on after graduating, but Fulenwider remains in the gym on her own time, finding new players to join her in getting shots up.
"Emily Edwards's best friend on the team is Lauren, and when those two get together, they push each other," Grothe says. "They're working out together this summer in Austin along with R'Yani Vaughn, which is something I'm super excited about."
And so the season ends as it began, with friends in an empty gym, working on getting better for an upcoming season.