The Aggies open their home schedule on Saturday at 12 noon when St Mary's comes to town. The Gaels won their opener in impressive fashion with a come from behind 66-61 at Nevada. This game will be a big step up in competition over the Aggies two previous games against lower division opponents.
Bummer. Don't win many games in which you only score 5 in the final quarter. On the flip side, the Aggies don't lose many in which they hold their opponent to 52.
The season might still be okay but more games like these makes it more and more likely that this team's ceiling is getting a first round draw @ Stanford again
Jen can use this for a teaching moment for this team because St Mary's exposed the current weaknesses that the Aggie need to work on especially rebounding. St Mary's won the game by out rebounding the Ags 42-27 of which 13 were offensive boards which led to 10 second chance points to only 2 for the Aggies. That's the difference in the ball game right there. Rebounding is a combination of blocking out, physicality and determination and St Mary's did it better than the Aggies.
The Gaels also locked down on defense when it counted. They got themselves back into the game when they were 11 down and the Ags relaxed on defense and got out hustled on rebounds. They forced 3 Aggie TO's in the final 1:38 and held the Ags to 1 of 7 shooting in the final 3 minutes. In short, they closed out the game.
Even though we lost, I thought there was a lot of improvement overall by the Ags except in rebounding. There was better ball movement on offense and stretches of very good defense, They can build on that. These two teams seem to battle like this each year and the Gaels executed better when it counted the most this year.
Those are great numbers for Sage and Hall had 5 boards. You're right though, where was the rest of the teams when it came to the boards?
No one else had more than one rebound. Sage is great when the ball comes of the board near her and she's in good position but the Gaels where getting the 50/50 balls that came off the rim wide. It looked like they just went after those balls harder than us.