Editor's note: Ball State's Amy Zercher and Tamara Bowie will share a weekly diary with ESPN.com throughout the season. This week, Bowie sums up the Cardinals' past two games.

Feb. 5, 2001

	Tamara Bowie averaged 18.6 points and 8.4 rebounds as a sophomore in 2000-01.

Hello! How's everyone doing? Finishing up another week, we went 1-1 with a disappointing loss to Toledo at home and then bounced back with a nice win over Miami on Saturday. We are now 17-4 overall and 9-1 in the Mid-American Conference. The 17 wins ties for the most in school history. At this point, we are excited about the 17 wins, but we are still not satisfied.

Excitement remains at a high on campus about our team. Last week, we had several interviews with the media and also a photo shoot on Tuesday for the front page of our school newspaper, The Daily News. The photo was a lot of fun to do. It was of the starting five (Shala Crook, Amy Zercher, Laurie Kitts, Jessica Reiter and myself) and was for a front page story called Unselfishly Earning Respect, which is exactly what we are trying to do. Our team's motto is "unselfish play."

With all the excitement, we knew going into the Toledo game that it was going to be a big one. Maybe we got ourselves too pumped for the game because we got off to a slow start. With all the noise and distractions going on around us, it was hard to hear each other on the court, and I think that's why our communication was off. It was a good game for us, though. In order to be a championship team, we have to learn to play in that kind of environment. We appreciate all the fans who continue to come out and support us. The fans are very important to our success.

Toledo led by 20 points with about nine minutes to go, but we fought back to bring it within six with a minute left. For awhile it seemed like we were going to pull it out, but time wasn't on our side. We dug ourselves into too big of a hole early. But it's only one game and even though it hurt at the time, we learned from our mistakes and we were ready to play again.

Still shaken up from Wednesday's loss, we came out tentative against Miami on Saturday. Down by four going into the half, we had to get ourselves together and play Ball State basketball. We knew we weren't playing our style of basketball in the first half and coach O reminded us of that at halftime.

We fell behind by 10 points early in the second half. The five players on the court at the time gathered together and decided it was time to start playing. That's when we went on a 23-9 run to put us back on top -- and we never looked back from there. We scored 57 points in the second half to win 95-83. As a team, we needed that win to get our confidence back.

This week we face two of the top teams in the MAC and both games are on the road. It's another big test for our team with games at Toledo and then at Buffalo. With six games remaining in the regular season, we are trying to reach our peak before going into the MAC tournament. We continue to try and get better each day and we want to be playing our best basketball before March.

Peace, Bowie