MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Rick Insell's 2020-21 Blue Raiders earned the veteran coach's 10th bid to the NCAA Tournament with a C-USA Tournament title. And expectations remain sky high for the upcoming season after an influx of transfers and highly-touted freshmen has refreshed the Middle Tennessee roster. 

Following a typical practice for the Lady Raiders, featuring a plethora of defensive drills, offensive sets, and press breaking, GoBlueRaiders.com caught up with Coach Insell to see how the offseason has gone for his team, and measure his excitement for the season ahead. 

Coming off a year where you won the C-USA title, expectations appear to still be high heading into the coming season. How do you feel about your team after the first few weeks of practice? 

I feel real good. I'm real excited. We've got a lot of young players that have really come in and brought great focus and brought great energy and passion for the game. You take all of those ingredients and you put them together with what we had coming back, it's going to lead to a great season. There's not a doubt in my mind we're going to have a good season.

What was the off season emphasis for y'all heading into this year? 

Right now it's just reacting. We've got so many young players. We've got only three young ladies back that have played. We've got to introduce the rest of them, which is 10 other players, to what's going on. Our terminology, how hard we want to play, what we want to do in every situation. 

We're not going to be ready to go by the first game, we're not going to be at full force, and we shouldn't be. If we are, then we'll probably peak out. If we can get there and we can be about 50-60 percent, 45-55 percent, for the first game, I'll be pretty happy. 

Who are some of the players who've surprised you early with the step forward they've taken in the preseason? 

I think Jalynn Gregory has done a great job coming in as a freshman. I think Courtney Blakely, as a freshman, and Dor Saar, I'm really pleased with both of them. The post players have all gotten better as a group, so I'm very happy about that. And then our other perimeters are doing good. So it's not any one player stuck out, I think it's a group that has stuck out. 

From talking to you, it seems like you have a lot of depth on this year's team. Will we get a chance to see some of that depth early this season? 

Basically, the depth that you'll see is the people I can trust in practice. You don't develop depth in a game, you develop your depth in practice. If they come in here and execute, make the correct pass, know the offenses, get up in somebody and play hard, they're going to get some playing time. And that's where you learn to trust your players. When I get to the point where I trust a player, I have no problem putting them in, in any situation. 

Obviously, this season will see y'all welcome back fans to a full capacity Murphy Center. What does it mean for your team to have fans back in the stands again? 

Thank goodness. Home court advantage again! We were talking yesterday, and I told (SID) Tony Stinnett yesterday during picture day, if you want to take a team picture, come see our games. That's our team picture, where we've got our crowd here and everybody's involved. 

As long as our fan base can get to their season tickets. What bothers me is you've got two different season ticket groups. Some of the men's basketball fans have women's tickets, so of the women's basketball fans have men's, but not all of them. So really, what you want to do is make sure they can sit in their seats.