When the women’s basketball team takes the court tomorrow, it will be 70 days since its last loss. Over the past two months, the Bombers have forgotten how to lose a basketball game, winning a school record of 16 games in a row.

After the team’s one-point loss to St. Lawrence University on Dec. 11, the Bombers refocused and recognized that they could be great, but only if they tweaked their mind-set.

“We wanted to get back to playing as a team,” senior Katherine Bixby said. “We had lost some of that. That [St. Lawrence] game wasn’t a fun game either. Nobody looked like they liked the game of basketball. When we all got back from winter break, we had the same goal — that we wanted to start winning.”

By picking up its defensive intensity, the team has not suffered a loss since its 15 consecutive conference games began. Many teams actually need a loss in order to improve, but for Ithaca, winning is helping the most.

“There’ve definitely been some setbacks,” junior Elissa Klie said. “We’ve had some tough games where we haven’t meshed as well as we could have and still came out with wins. The big thing is that we’re learning from every game we play this year.”

During this streak, the Blue and Gold have won by two, and they have won by 30. They have scored anywhere from 55 to 82 points and were still able to find something to improve on in practice for their next contest.

This season, practice can also be traced to another improvement for the Bombers — health.

“We’ve never had practices like this before,” Bixby said. “We used to have practices where we were full-court going really hard for two hours. We used to lift every day too. This year, we just have a different theme of keeping everybody really healthy.”

After a few bumps and bruises early on in the season, that theme is finally paying off and has kept the Blue and Gold at full strength over the course of the streak.

By being healthy, Ithaca’s aggressive nature is back and can be seen with someone like freshman 6-footer Devin Shea diving on the floor for a loose ball. Bixby said that hustle is an example of coming together as a team, which Head Coach Dan Raymond sees as well.

“They have the mind-set that they don’t want to let anybody else down,” he said. “Everybody is holding each other accountable for their performance.”

The seniors instilled that, with accountability at the beginning of the season and the success that they have had, the program has received a boost.

“I’m hoping it’s going to carry over and lead the program in the direction we want to go by just being hungry and not satisfied with just winning the regular season,” Raymond said. “That’s not enough, we want to make noise in the NCAA tournament.”

The athletes agree and know that an undefeated Empire 8 regular season and long winning streak does not mean as much without a tournament championship under their belt.

“I really just want to win the E8 tournament,” Bixby said. “We can’t relax completely yet — we have to finish the job.”