Braves Open Valley Road Slate At Evansville & Indiana St.

Duane Zehr

Women's Basketball 1/10/2019 9:55:00 AM

PEORIA, Ill. -- Bradley Women's Basketball hits the road for the first time in three weeks, opening the Missouri Valley Conference road schedule with games at Evansville (Friday) and at Indiana State (Sunday) after playing six of the last nine at home.

The Braves (10-3 overall, 0-2 MVC) enter Friday's 6 p.m. game at Evansville (2-11 overall, 0-2 MVC) looking for their first MVC win of the year. Bradley has earned its first conference win on the road each of the last two years and four of the last five seasons.

Indiana State (7-6 overall, 1-1 MVC) edged Southern Illinois Sunday for its first Valley win of the year and the Sycamores have played just one home game over the last month heading into a Friday night matchup with Illinois State at the Hulman Center in Terre Haute, Ind. Bradley and Indiana State will tip things off Sunday at 1 p.m. (CST) at the Hulman Center.

Both weekend contests will be available on ESPN+, while BradleyBraves.com will also provide links to live stats along with the WIRL 1290 AM audio stream for both games.

Bradley won all three matchups with Evansville last year and the Braves own a 31-20 lead in the all-time series. In fact, BU has won five of the last six contests against the Purple Aces and 10 of the last 14. Bradley is 11-13 on the road in the series after last year's 117-59 win at Evansville and the Braves 6-4 in their last 10 road matchups with the Purple Aces.

Indiana State swept the regular-season series last season and leads the all-time series 50-25. The last meeting was decided by four points with the Sycamores edging Bradley 74-70 at Renaissance Coliseum last February.

Bradley has three road and one neutral site victory this season with the four wins away from home second in the MVC behind only Drake (7) and Indiana State (5). The Braves are 5-4 on the road in the month of January under third-year head coach Andrea Gorski.

Sunday's game at Indiana State will mark Bradley's fifth game of the year in the Eastern Time Zone. The Braves have not played five games in the Eastern Time Zone since 2011-12 and Bradley's three wins in the Eastern Time Zone (at Florida Atlantic, vs. Delaware & at Cleveland St.) are the team's most since going 4-2 during that same 2011-12 campaign.

Junior Chelsea Brackmann highlighted Sunday's overtime contest against Northern Iowa with just the third 20-20 performance in school history. Brackmann, who scored a season-best 22 points, tied the Bradley single-game record with 24 rebounds and also tallied a career-best four blocks which included rejecting a potential game-winning shot at the end of regulation as Bradley rallied from 18 down in the fourth quarter to force overtime.

Brackmann's 24 boards are the second most in the country this season and tied for the fifth most in MVC history. In fact, no MVC player has collected 24 rebounds in a game since 2009 and she had the first 20-20 effort in a conference game dating back to a 26-point, 21-rebound performance by Dyana Pierre (SIU) vs. Northern Iowa on Feb. 8, 2015. The last 20-20 effort by a Bradley player was Shelli Braud at UNI on Jan. 17, 1988 (32 points & 21 reb.). Brackmann, who is 17th in the nation in rebounds per game (11.4 per game), matched the Bradley single-game rebounding mark held Tammy Jo Hirstein (vs. Indiana St. - Feb. 25, 1984).

Sophomore Gabi Haack is connecting on a league-high 2.9 three-pointers per game and is 38-for-99 from beyond the arc (38.4 percent) this season. Haack has made at least three three-pointers in five of the last six games (17-for-43 - 39.5%), and moved into Bradley's career top 10 for three-point makes with a 3-for-6 performance from long range in Sunday's game against Northern Iowa. Haack tied Devyn Flanagan's (2004-08) career three-point total of 106 triples and is just seven three's from climbing three more spots into seventh in Bradley history.

Bradley's leading scorer at 16.7 points per game, Haack has scored in double figures in 12 of 13 games this season and 14 of the last 15 games dating back to last season. In fact, her only game not scoring in double figures this season was a nine-point effort against Rockhurst. Haack has scored 10 or more points in 11 consecutive games for the longest streak by a Brave since Monica Rogers scored at least 10 points in the final 11 contests of the 2008-09 campaign. The last Brave to score 10 points or more in 12 consecutive games was Sara Bailey, who reached double digits in scoring in the final eight games of 2000-01 and first four contests of 2001-02. Bailey also had a streak of 16 consecutive games in double figures during her sophomore season (2000-01).

Last year, Haack averaged 16.4 points per game and was a combined 17-for-32 (53.1 percent) from three-point range in the five games against Evansville and Indiana State.

Freshman Tatum Koenig has also helped highlight Bradley's youth movement as underclassmen have accounted for 51.2 points per game or nearly 70 percent of the team's scoring. Since her 16-point outburst at Cleveland State, which included 11 four-quarter points to help fuel Bradley's rally against the Vikings, Koenig has averaged 6.2 points per game over the last five games to rank fifth on the squad. During that stretch, she has dished out 2.2 assists per outing with just one turnover.

Following the weekend swing through Indiana, Bradley returns to Renaissance Coliseum to host Missouri State Friday, Jan. 18 in a 7 p.m. game.

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