Many times throughout the season, Massachusetts’ women’s basketball coach Sharon Dawley has referred to her team’s performances as “a tale of two halves” – sloppy play in the first half followed by a scrappy comeback in the second half.
UMass (3-24, 0-13 Atlantic 10) outscored Richmond 45-42 in the second half on Wednesday night, but still fell short losing 89-76 to the Spiders for its 17th consecutive loss.
If you watched the second half of the game, you might have thought that the Minutewomen were having a decent season. They rebounded well, forced turnovers with their press and made timely baskets down the stretch. However, basketball is a 40-minute game and UMass dug itself too far into a hole after the first half.
“I was really pleased with the second half, coming out and beating them 45-42,” Dawley said. “Overall we played with a lot of intensity in the second half. We did a really good applying pressure and forcing traps with good intensity.”
Down by as many as 20 points in the second half, UMass slowly chipped away at the Richmond lead with a full court pressure that forced turnovers, which led to easy buckets for the Minutewomen. The Spiders’ lead was cut down to just seven after three consecutive baskets from Alyx Stiff, Jasmine Harris and Rashida Timbilla.
Richmond (12-14, 6-7 A-10) entered Wednesday’s game only averaging 63 points per game, along with 4.1 3-pointers on 27.2 percent shooting from deep. However, with the Minutewomen starting the game in a 2-3 zone, the Spiders took advantage of the slow rotations, making all seven of their three pointers in the first half.
Lauren Tolson finished with a team-high 17 points in the win as Richmond had five different scorers in double figures. Janelle Hubbard, who penetrated the UMass defense all night long, finished with 14 points on 7-of-13 shooting, while also finished the game with nine assists.
“We didn’t rotate well enough in the 2-3 (zone); it’s not our mainstay,” Dawley said. “We worked on it because historically, they struggled against the zone and we wanted to see if that would remain true. Our shifts weren’t quick enough, so we had to switch to man and throw different stuff at them in the backcourt.”
The two leading scorers for the Minutewomen came off the bench as Harris finished with a game high 21 points and Kim Pierre-Louis finished with 15 points and 10 rebounds. It was the fifth double-double of the season for Pierre-Louis, who had seven offensive rebounds.
“(Richmond) wasn’t doing a very good job of boxing me out so I decided to be really aggressive,” Kim Pierre-Louis said. “Offensive rebounds was a big focus at practice so it was really imbedded in my mind.”
Timbilla scored all 14 of her points in the second half after struggling to get in any sort of offensive rhythm in the first half.
Although UMass may have lost its 17th game in a row, the team isn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet, and is excited to build off its play in the second half of this game.
“We just have to keep up the intensity in practice and play with the intensity we did in the second half at the beginning of the game in our next one,” Harris said.
The Minutewomen are just 2-21 this season when trailing at halftime.
UMass’ next game will be this Sunday at home when they take on Rhode Island at 2 p.m.
Andrew Cyr can be reached at [email protected], and can be followed on Twitter @Andrew_Cyr.
