SIU Edwardsville recently lost two games in the final minute. Amy Austin tells us all about it.

After a very tough weekend loss, in which we saw our three-point lead with seven seconds to go evaporate and disappear with one shot and a foul against the eighth-ranked team in the country, you would hope that having an upperclassmen team would bounce back and learn from the mistakes we made. We didn't. Not at all.

Just five days after the heartbreaking loss we did it AGAIN! We were not playing our best basketball, but we had the lead with less than a minute to go and ended up folding. Luckily, our team places no blame on any one person and came back to beat our next opponent. We did a great job of rebounding especially limiting them to seven offensive rebounds. Although our turnovers were once again high, we at least found a way to overcome our mistakes and dig deep to win.

Now, I could dwell on the losses but I believe in truly learning from your mistakes and moving toward the future. We need to buckle down on defense, take care of the ball, and block every person out because you never know when that one rebound will hurt you. We need to take pride in finishing a game, not stopping when we think we have the game won. But most importantly, we need to have confidence in one another, the coaches, and the goals we have set to achieve, despite everything else that is happening.

Our record in the conference sits at 4-3 so we are very much in the race to a conference championship, although this next road trip is crucial. We travel to Owensboro, Kentucky and Evansville, Indiana for some very tough match-ups against Kentucky Wesleyan and Southern Indiana. Both teams are capable of anything although their records might not indicate their power. From here on out, we must win and treat every game as if it were our last.