FRISCO, Texas – It’s back to the drawing board for the Lady Toppers.

Regrouping into the same Western Kentucky team that put itself in position to win a regular-season championship is what the Lady Toppers want to get back to, not the team that missed out on that goal by losing two straight to close the regular season.

WKU (21-8, 12-4 Conference USA) took the floor Tuesday night for its only practice at The Star before kicking off the C-USA tournament in the quarterfinals at 1:30 p.m. Thursday against the winner of Florida Atlantic and Texas-San Antonio.

Redshirt sophomore Dee Givens walked off the floor energized and confident the Lady Toppers are back to form and ready to defend their C-USA tournament crown.

“I think everybody is more focused now and we figured out what went wrong on the road this week,” Givens said. “We came back this week and really focused on defense.”

Lack of defense and communication broke WKU down in back-to-back losses to close the regular season against Southern Mississippi and Texas-El Paso. It was the first time since Michelle Clark-Heard’s first season coaching in 2012-13 that the Lady Toppers dropped consecutive games prior to the tournament.

WKU’s defense on the road this season allowed a .459 defensive shooting percentage average and .400 in C-USA games overall. Against UTEP in the second half, the Miners shot 74 percent from the floor.

“We really worked on some stuff the last few days in practice and really regained our focus and locked in on defense and looking at film at things we didn’t do well the past few games,” said senior Ivy Brown, who was named the C-USA Defensive Player of the Year on Tuesday. “Just our defense and communicating with each other, we didn’t really do a lot of that the past few games. That’s been the key for us all season in winning games. Just get back to what we’ve been doing.”

On top of that, the Brown show alone can’t win WKU another C-USA tournament championship. There’s not much more Heard can ask of her two seniors who have led the Lady Toppers to the No. 2 seed in the tournament, and she wants consistency from everyone else.

Ivy Brown led WKU in scoring with 20 and 31 points against USM and UTEP, respectively, and Tashia Brown averaged 16.5 points in those two contests.

After the seniors, C-USA Freshman of the Year Raneem Elgedawy and Givens – named the league’s Sixth Player of the Year – have been the biggest contributors, but even their game has been inconsistent recently.

The Lady Toppers need more from everyone on the team without the last name of Brown.

In WKU’s 80-75 loss at UTEP on Saturday, Givens fouled out in the fourth quarter with six points. Elgedawy had two points and a pair of rebounds, but played just 19 minutes with four fouls.

Whitney Creech played the third-most minutes (34) and dished out a career-high nine assists to go with six points and Sidnee Bopp added nine points on 3-for-4 shooting from behind the arc.

Last week against Southern Miss, Elgedawy was the second-leading scorer with 17 points, then outside of the Browns, seven other players combined to score 12 points.

Heard has mentioned the youth and inexperience of her team all season. For the most part, they’ve played well enough to put themselves in position to win a C-USA regular-season title, but lost that chance over the weekend.

Now that it’s tournament time, Heard wants the best out of every Lady Topper.

“Everyone knows Tashia and Ivy and what they bring to the table,” Heard said. “Everyone thinks if you stop those two, you have a chance to win. We have to have everyone step up and that’s what we’ve been doing all year. … Tashia is going to get their best defender and Ivy is going to get their next-best defender. When you get open shots, you’ve got to be able to knock them down and be confident when you do it. Before we went on this stretch, we have a lot of young players who have never played this many games before and traveled. It was a very big learning lesson for us.”{&end}