The Marshall Thundering Herd women’s basketball team will face off against Louisiana Tech Thursday evening in a game where Marshall Head Coach Tony Kemper said the key to victory is to find a way to disrupt Louisiana Tech’s senior shooting guard, Kierra Anthony.

“We need to really do a good job putting players around (Anthony),” Kemper said in an interview on Tuesday. “We need to do as a good a job as we can at making her shots really tough. She will still make some, but we have to stay in there and be tough to get her guarded like we need to.”

The Herd is coming off a road victory in Florida where it defeated conference opponent Florida International, 86-58, to advance its conference record to 4-1 and Kemper says that the spirits are high.

“We are in a pretty good place right now,” he said. “We are definitely playing the best basketball of the year for us.”

Kemper said he hopes to emulate the confidence the team showed against Florida International in the upcoming game.

“The second half of that game, we just kind of let out a little bit in terms of not holding back with our energy on the defensive end,” he said. “We went ahead and relaxed and played offense together. We shot the ball really well and moved the ball really well. We played a pretty clean second half down in (Florida). It was fun to watch.”

Despite the win, Kemper said that there is always room for improvement.

“We can continue in all phases to get a little bit better,” he said. “We didn’t play great for 40 minutes. We played great for 20. We played tough and mentally tough in the 1st half but we played a lot better basketball in the 2nd half.”

Kemper said the Herd needs to continue to try and get consistent for 40 minutes of good basketball.

“We have our spurts where we are very good and we got to string those spurts out where they last even longer than what they do now,” he said.

Tipoff is slated for 6 p.m. at the Cam Henderson Center.

Millard Stickler can be contacted at [email protected].