By Tyler Byrum, Contributor

Immediately the 2017 season is going to be a year where the Women’s Basketball team must prove their worth. Accepting an invite to the Preseason WNIT, the team will open up their year against the 2017 WNIT Champions, the Michigan Wolverines on November 10.

It is the first game of the winnable non-conference slate for the Patriots. Other than Michigan and the rest of their ‘to be named’ WNIT opponents, there is only one other team that finished in the top 100 of the RPI last season on the schedule. Drake finished 26th in the RPI and made the NCAA Tournament last season but Mason might not even play them depending on the scheduling of the Colorado Thanksgiving Tournament.

Other than those two tournaments, there are nine other non-conference games and seven of them will be at home in EagleBank Arena. Nothing is guaranteed, but there is a strong possibility the program could enter conference play with a winning record at the start of the new year.

The team returns eight players who logged considerable minutes last year, three of them being starters. Sophomore Jacy Bolton is the team’s top returning scorer with 8.6 points a game last season.