The message from ISU coach Bill Fennelly is simple: The ISU women’s basketball team needs to pick it up on defense.

There’s no doubt the Cyclones can light up their half of the scoreboard — that was made clear in their season-opening 98-76 win against University of South Carolina Upstate. Allowing the Spartans to put up 44 points and drain 9-of-14 3-pointers in the second half, however, isn’t flying with Fennelly.

“Obviously defense was optional on our side of the ball today,” Fennelly said after the Nov. 16 game. “We were atrocious defensively. We got to get better real quickly.”

Quickly might be an understatement.

The Cyclones face a two-day turnaround before a Nov. 18 matchup with their Interstate 35 neighbor Drake. With just a single hour of practice Nov. 17, Fennelly said a lot of improvement in the defensive department will lie on the shoulders of his players.

“That’s the one thing about basketball, too, is you don’t have a lot of time. We’ll practice for an hour today,” Fennelly said. “You can’t do a lot. Sometimes it just falls on the player’s individual responsibility. You got to do your job. You got to guard better.”

Protecting the perimeter will start with the guards charged with checking Bulldogs Lizzy Wendell and Kyndal Clark, who combined to make seven of Drake’s ten 3-pointers in its season-opening loss to South Dakota on Nov. 14.

ISU guard Nikki Moody suggested that such a task begins with taking things a bit more personally instead of shrugging it off because the Cyclones know they can also pour it on from distance.

“I think we just need to take it harder than what we did,” Moody said. “We were just out there, kind of letting them get things that we shouldn’t have and that we practiced [for]. We just need to focus more on defense.”

More effort is also being demanded of freshman center Bryanna Fernstrom on the glass.

Fernstrom took no time at all to break out in her first game for Iowa State, putting up 25 points to set the ISU record for a freshman debut. She shot 50 percent from the field, including 2-for-2 beyond the arc, to go with 7-of-7 shooting on free throws.

While there really isn’t much she can do to improve in that department, Fernstrom only came away with three rebounds Nov. 16. For a 6-foot-5-inch center who was nearly a head above the competition, that simply isn’t going to cut it moving forward.

“Watching film, I’m right under the rebound, but then I see a guard coming, and I let them take it,” Fernstrom said. “[The coaches] told me to be a little more selfish when it comes to that. Just make sure I grab onto the ball because I’m there, and I’m able to get it, but I’m not taking it because I’m allowing them to get all the rebounds.”

Though the Cyclones are focusing hard on improvement, it’s still early in the season, so mistakes aren’t uncommon. However, there won’t be much room for them with this early-season test that provides an immediate insight toward which schools lie where on the in-state totem pole.

“It’s important to us — it is. I’m not going to lie,” Fennelly said. “These games mean a lot [and] the attention that our sport gets is great. It’s important to our fan base. We want to be the best at everything we do, but you certainly have to start with you [wanting] to be the best basketball team in our state.”