By Morris Phillips

BERKELEY, CA–Coach Charmin Smith needs her Cal team to clean up their ball handling and cut down on the turnovers. But on Wednesday, Smith scheduled Grambling, a conundrum disguised as a basketball team that lives and breathes by forcing their opponents to cough up the ball.

The result: an 86-63 win for the hosts, but the Bears committed 26 turnovers, which set off alarms inside Haas Pavilion.

“We have to take better care of the ball,” Smith admitted. “We know that. We’re living dangerously right now. We have to clean it up.”

The Bears are 5-0 with a signature win at Gonzaga. As a testament to how well they’ve played overall, the Bears have spent every second of their five second halves so far with at least a 10-point lead. That’s noticeable and impressive enough to capture ESPN Bracketology’s attention, which projects the Bears as an NCAA qualifier as a No. 11 seed.

Of course, the season is young, and bigger tests are on the immediate horizon, starting with Auburn’s visit to Berkeley on Friday night. Following Auburn, the Bears  will see Michigan State and either Arizona or Vanderbilt in Palm Springs. All three schools are also projected as NCAA teams, meaning the jockeying for postseason position starts now.

What Smith liked was just as apparent as the unsightly turnovers: a five-minute stretch in the third quarter in which Cal made eight 3-pointers. That ballooned Cal’s 13-point lead to a 67-41 advantage that effectively ended the visiting Tigers upset aspirations.

Lulu Twidale led Cal with 19 points, a total boosted by her efficient 4 for 7 shooting from distance. Marta Suarez added 16, Ioanna Krimili had 15, and freshman post Gabrielle Abigor scored 11 on 4 for 4 shooting.

Kahia Warmsley led Grambling with 16 points, and Douthshine Prien and Lydia Freeman had 10 each. The Tigers were the SWAC regular season champions last season, winning 23 games. Coach Courtney Simmons concedes that her group, with 10 new faces this season, doesn’t shoot it well, but they do commit to a tremendous amount of defensive activity across all 94 feet, which explains how they succeed in the SWAC. But against Cal, the disparity in made threes (12-1 for Cal) and 32 percent shooting for the Tigers made for a lopsided result.

“If you research and do your homework on this, we probably shot 30 something percent last year and won 23 games,” Simmons said. “The key to the way we play is to rebound the basketball. In this system, there’s no such thing as a bad shot. We don’t go out and recruit kids that can only shoot the basketball. I recruit athletes to give the kids that can shoot the ball a little bit of problems.”

Simmons, intently dissecting the numbers with a scoresheet in hand, conceded that her Tigers fell short of 30 offensive rebounds, their average which leads the nation. Grambling managed “just” 19 o-boards, which wasn’t enough to compensate for their poor shooting.

“It’s the discipline factor. It’s not finding the shooters in transition, which was the same thing that happened to us at Tulane (in their previous game),” she said.

Auburn, a physical, defensive-minded group as well, arrives on Friday in a rematch of last season’s meeting in Alabama that went to Cal, 67-53 with Suarez scoring 27 points.