Jamelle Cornley had two long days of practice before he had a chance to change the one thing eating him up.
Cornley, along with the rest of starting frontline, pulled down zero offensive rebounds in their last game. Thursday night against Hartford, after Cornley grabbed half of his 10 rebounds off his teammate's misses, the senior forward doesn't expect there to be a rebounding drought of that magnitude anytime soon.
"That's a statistic that I don't like seeing," Cornley said. "When you see goose eggs all around the board like that, that's not a fun stat. I don't see that happening for the rest of the year."
Penn State pulled down 12 offensive rebounds and held a marginal 33-16 edge on the glass in Thursday night's win against the Hawks. Cornley and sophomore forward D.J. Jackson pulled down nine offensive boards.
Hawks coach Dan Leibovitz said the rebounding discrepancy was deceptive because Penn State shot 60 percent for the game.
"The more concerning thing is the ratio of their misses," Leibovitz said. "They missed 20, and they came up with 12. We came up with 8."
Leibovitz said his 2-3, matchup zone was prone to creating mismatches on the wing where a perimeter player was stuck having to duel with the physicality of the Lions' frontcourt.
Cornley, who Leibovitz said was more physical than any player on the Connecticut team his squad faced on Nov. 17, echoed the Hawks' coach reason for the Lions' success on the glass.
"They had to compact," Cornley said, "and with the shooting that we had, now I was able to duck in and get some seals around the free throw line. Any time you can get the ball where that Big Ten logo is, you're gonna damage any defense. It doesn't matter what defense you come up with."
Whether it was Jackson skying high over two Hawk defenders or senior guard Stanley Pringle having the ball gravitate to him at the foul line after a long miss, the Lions' clearly took to heart their coach's basic approach to the game the last two days in the gym.
"Rebound the ball," Ed DeChellis said was the focal point. "Rebound the ball and outlet it."
The Lions adhered, and more importantly didn't run into foul issues while doing so. Instead of reaching and lunging toward the ball like last game, players got low, sealed off their defenders and secured the ball with both hands.
One heavily contested battle for the basketball ended with Cornley bringing the ball --firmly glued to his hands -- to his chest, with both elbows brushing off pesky defenders.
"Every time we miss we wanna take advantage of those misses and try our hardest to try and get the offensive rebound," Cornley said. "In practice, we really got after it, beat each other up, and it showed today."
