Marshall head women’s basketball coach Juli Fulks blames abundance of fouls for opening loss vs Toledo.

 By Ben Anderson

    The Juli Fulks era of Marshall women’s basketball debuted on Monday night with a loss 71-68 loss to Toledo that the new head coached blamed on an abundance of fouls. 

    “One of the challenges we knew they had some really sound big post players.” Marshall women’s head basketball coach Juli Fulks said during her postgame news conference. “We got into some foul trouble and into some really unique lineups as the game went on.”

    The Herd was called for 26 fouls, compared to Toledo’s 19. Blessing King, and Leyocha Marigney both came off the bench and fouled out, forcing Fulks to juggle the lineups. 

    I thought it was great and we went really deep into the bench (and) when you have three people fouling out and we lost somebody to an injury,” Fulks said.  “We were in some really unique lineups, and you know huge credit to our players of all the lineups.” 

    With the scenario of using many different roster rotations brought the future opportunity to work on discipline in practice.

    “We need to do a better job in practice of keeping everybody really disciplined and probably really blowing the whistle a lot more,” Fulks said. “If we could have got a couple of those back and got a few more stops (we could have won).” 

    Fulks said that a game like this brought many learning curves for the team moving forward.

    “At the end of the day we can only control what we can control, and we can't control what the refs are going to call all we can do (is) respond to it well and keep competing,” Fulks said. 

    “There's so much the film is going to be really beneficial from this game offensively defensively on the rebounds,” Fulks said. “While there was a lot of things that are good there's still so much more that we can do.”

    Marshall started the contest on a high scoring run as it outscored Toledo 22-8. Toledo would get the game back within six points trailing 37-29 at the break. 

    Fulks said that she was impressed with the team’s performance despite the foul trouble.

    “I thought we had a lot of things go in our favor and things that we wanted to have happen and we defended really well,” Fulks said. “They ended up getting I think 20 points from the free throw line, but I thought we had a lot of really good stops.” 

    Fulks said that playing the Toledo, ranked fifth in the Mid-American Conference, will help the Herd.

    “I love me some Sun Belt-MAC Challenge,” Fulks said. “I was really excited for the Toledo draw.”

    The contest pitted the two teams together with the challenges pitting teams from the Sun Belt Conference and the Mid-American Conference.

    Fulks said that she understood that Toledo would bring an early challenge for the Thundering Herd.

    “This was a team that had a chance to be an at large in the NCAA tournament last year and returned you know a huge core of that team,” Fulks said. “We knew right away this was going to show us what we were made of and what we're capable of.”