Maybe the past three weeks have been some sort of cruel lesson in patience.

The University of Wisconsin women's basketball team, though, is getting a little tired of waiting for its season to get back on track, even though the Badgers are confident that will happen.

Quite simply, what's happened in the first five games of the Big Ten Conference season wasn't in the script for a team that returned all of its major contributors from last season's Women's National Invitation Tournament runner-up team.

UW, expected to challenge for the Big Ten title and return to the NCAA tournament for the first time since the 2001-02 season, sits 10th in the league standings at 1-4 and is 8-7 overall heading into Thursday night's game against much-improved Michigan (10-5, 3-2) at the Kohl Center.

"It has to turn around," said Badgers senior guard Jolene Anderson, the Big Ten's leading scorer at 19.5 points per game. "It's just definitely urgency on our part, knowing that we have to keep on getting after (it), keep on doing the things that we need to do."

UW coach Lisa Stone compared her team's situation to that of a canoe battling against a strong current. And once that current shifts, she said, the Badgers will have it behind them.

Stone saw improvement in UW's 78-74 overtime loss at Iowa Sunday, a game in which the Badgers battled back from a seven-point, second-half deficit behind Anderson's 42 points.

But the painful reality for UW is this: If the Badgers want to salvage their season, then they had better start to fix the deficiencies that have plagued them.

They're not new problems, either. UW is still struggling to come up with scorers to complement Anderson and senior guard Janese Banks (14.4 points per game). No one has emerged as a consistent threat in the post. And sophomore point guard Rae Lin D'Alie's play in the past two games — she's committed 10 turnovers against four assists — has been erratic.

"It's early and there's a whole lot of basketball left," said UW associate athletic director Terry Gawlik, who oversees women's basketball.

Indeed, that's the good news for the Badgers. This season is the first since the 1993-94 season that features an 18-game conference schedule — a 16-game schedule was used the past 13 years — giving UW more time to recover from its shaky start.

And only one team — No. 16 Ohio State — has fewer than two losses in Big Ten play.

"The kids, they've got to keep believing," Stone said. "You can beat this thing to death, we can go in and watch film and say, 'Goll darn it. Look at our record now. We need to look at our record at the end of the year. We need to get this next game here and prepare for it hard and be intense and stay consistent.''