Just got home from work; missed most of the first half. Aggies up ten, 48-38. Stories so far seem to be shooting (both teams doing well) and turnovers. UCD with only two TOs and SMU with eleven, leading to 23 Aggie points. Keep it up!
Bertsch with 14 pts and the Eatons with 17 pts and 7 assists, combined.
Great game. Very entertaining and a great shot by bertsch to win it. Both teams hustled. A few more free throws down the stretch would have been nice but overall a lot of fun
What a great shot by Bertsch! Thanks for all the timely posts, Russ. I wasn't able to watch this game and reading your posts made me feel like I was there in the final minute.
Yes, thanks for posting Russ. I enjoyed reading all of them after we got home.
The women only have one more game before league play. Seems like odd scheduling to only have 2 games during the holiday break. At least it will give them plenty of time to practice. Last nights game was the best I've seen them play this year. Offense got a little stagnant in the 2nd half, but the defensive effort was there. St. Mary's had a couple of very capable low post players that hurt us. We'll have to work on our interior defense for when we face CSUN and their 6'4" stud Channon Fluker.
Beautifully executed play. That was not an easy shot by Morgan but nothing but net! Karley Eaton curled around to the top of the 3 point line and was open for Morgan to kick the ball out too. The team made the coaches look good on that play! :grin:
Yeah, I was wondering why the player guarding the inbounds hadn't crashed down on Morgan--after I watched a couple times, I saw that she got caught trying to decide between the double team and guarding Kourtney coming off the sideline.
edit: actually upon further, further review, she just didn't commit to the DT.
Just a point about St. Mary's game tying possession. We were up by 3 when the Gaels bring the ball up court (14 secs left). We had THREE fouls to give. We easily could have killed most of the clock by forcing them to keep in bounding the ball. And this was coming off of a timeout, so the there was plenty of opportunity to communicate it to the players. Then when the Gaels got the ball deep we collapsed down (as we had most of the game) instead of continuing to guard the 3 point shooters. The center finds the open shooter who nails an open shot (contested late) to tie and set up Morgan's game winner. I thought we dreadfully mismanaged that whole defensive play and that could have cost us the game. Hopefully we learn.
Given the team's defensive play to that point, stealing an inbounds pass was not out of the realm of possibility, either.
On the flip side, Aggies did have a few players with 3 fouls and one (Bessolo?) with four, IIRC, so maybe that's why the coaches decided not to foul? Would be fun/interesting to hear from them on this.
You're right about the foul situation. Bessalo was out the last bit, probably due to her 4 fouls, even though her defense was needed. Seems we could have put some of the players at the end of the bench in to be the designated foulers. The coaching staff is top notch, though, so I'm sure they weighed all the alternatives and settled on just trying to play good solid defense.
Another week, another Big West PotW for Morgan Bertsch.
I didn't realize that she's in the top ten in career scoring for active players in the NCAA. That's wild. I would've guessed that the big name programs had a lock on that.