By Travis Cram | AVALANCHE-JOURNAL

The Texas Tech women’s basketball team has many underlying themes to start this season.

The Lady Raiders have a more experienced group back from last season, they have a change to their lineup with junior Jordan Murphree moving to power forward, and they have three new faces.

All three components showed up for the Lady Raiders’ 90-55 win over Idaho to open the season Friday night. They even had a new look with their uniforms, wearing red jerseys at home for the first time in a regular season game.

But it wasn't anything put to a vote by the team. Call it head coach Kristy Curry being courteous to others.

“Actually it was more of an issue to where we normally get everything dry-cleaned,” she said. “And we couldn’t turn the white (jerseys) around in time. We didn’t want to make everyone work too hard on Saturday to get our stuff ready for us on Sunday. So we thought we would change it up a little bit.”

The new look worked, especially for junior guard Maddy Brown, who led all Tech scorers with 18 points – hitting 5 of 7 3-pointers.

She was just one of five Lady Raiders in double-digits Friday night. Jordan Barncastle and Kierra Mallard, two freshmen, finished with 13 and 16, respectively.

The two forwards had an immediate impact on the inside, an area Curry wants to focus on as the team prepares for its 2 p.m. game today at United Spirit Arena with Washington State.

“We need to understand that regardless of what the score is, although we may know we’re going to win, we need to approach things differently,” she said, “and have a little bit more of a mean streak about us and a presence about us and play more to our capabilities. I just expect us to play every single possession like it’s our last. And I think we need to do a better job of that.”

Tech had a 10-rebound advantage (49-39) after having only a 19-15 edge midway through the game.

As hard as Curry said it is to judge the competition and how a team is handling it, she did note it is still impressive to walk away with a win and only have nine turnovers – a big focus over the offseason for her team.

“I thought we had some times where we really did some good things, and we just did a great job of taking care of the basketball,” she said. “Any time you can have only nine turnovers, I’ll take that.”