Correspondent photo / Robert Hayes. YSU’s Cris Carroll moves past Oakland’s Bordy Robinson during the second half on Thursday at Zidian Family Arena.

YOUNGSTOWN — At the turn of a new year, Youngstown State finds itself at a crossroads.

The Penguins suffered their third straight Horizon League defeat on Thursday against Oakland. It’s the first time that YSU has dropped three straight league games since it happened twice during the 2021-2022 season.

Now with a road game against Northern Kentucky looming on Sunday, and a home tilt with Purdue Fort Wayne coming on Wednesday, the Penguins find themselves trying to keep what previously looked to be another promising season from slipping away.

“Our team’s going through some growing pains right now,” head coach Ethan Faulkner said after the Oakland loss. “As I told them after the game, every team’s journey is a little bit different. Right now, we’re trying to learn that the margin for error is very small, and it’s going to continue to be small as you continue to play really good basketball teams in this league.

“The margin for error will be very small on Sunday when we play at Northern Kentucky. So we have to continue to play with the effort that we played with (Thursday).”

Getting back on the winning track, though, is a process, according to Faulkner.

Preventing the losses from snowballing requires the Penguins to continue to work through the issues that have popped up throughout the season, including rebounding and turnovers.

“This is a one day at a time thing, and our response to (Thursday), or any other night, is to show up and go to work (the next day), and that’s what we’ll do,” Faulkner said. “We’ve got to get some of our mistakes cleaned up and continue to eliminate losing before we can win at a high level.”

The game against Robert Morris on Dec. 17 slipped away because YSU turned the ball over 22 times — the Penguins are averaging the fourth-most turnovers per game among Horizon League teams at 14.1.

Then against the Golden Grizzlies, YSU failed to secure defensive rebounds on two late possessions that led to second-chance baskets that gave Oakland the win. The Penguins have ranked around the middle of the league in most rebounding statistics.

“We gotta continue to defensive rebound. We gotta continue to take care of the ball, which for the most part, we did well (against Oakland),” Faulkner said. “Those are things that have carried with us throughout the season in terms of areas of improvement.”

In the surprising loss to Detroit Mercy on Monday, Faulkner blamed the team’s lack of “connectedness” coming back from the holiday break, which has been a point of emphasis for the Penguins throughout the season.

“We gotta continue to get to be a more and more connected team,” Faulkner said. “I thought we looked connected (against Oakland). I thought we took a step back in that on Monday (against the Titans) in terms of some of our body language and guys maybe pointing the finger at other people rather than pointing back at ourselves.”

But even with the recent losses, no one is sounding the alarm just yet. The Penguins know that their goals are all still in front of them.

While the losses may affect their spot in the conference standings, they can still get on a roll during the second half of the season heading into the Horizon League tournament in March.

“(The losses) matter now, but if we get rolling in January, into February, that’s the biggest goal,” senior guard Bryson Dawkins said. “So I’d rather take these losses now, learn from them, and then once January, February comes, we’re all rolling and we’re all on the same page.”