The Ags are locked in a tight battle with Hofstra and take a 33-30 lead into halftime. They started off the game with some hot shooting but went stone cold in the last 5 minutes of the half and the Pride crept back in it.
The Aggies have decent size but they continue a concerning trend of poor rebounding. The Pride are pounding the Ags on the boards 25-15 and have scored 14 second chance points.

Lay ups and rebounding killed us today. Seems like the team played a little lethargic.

The Lady Ags suffered their first loss of the season falling to Hofstra 64-60. The Pride exposed the Achilles heel of the Aggies by out rebounding them by 15 boards 47-32 of which 19 were offensive rebounds that led to 18 second chance points. The Ags have decent size but lack quickness and aggressiveness on the boards and it cost them the game today.

Up 58-54 with 4 minutes to go the Ags had a chance to go up by 6 or 7 but couldn't score and turned the ball over at the 2:33 mark before Epps hit a 3 to make it 58-57. With the score 62-60 Morgan Bertsch made a beautiful spin move to shake her defender but missed the wide open layup .

This was a winnable game for the Aggies. Jen Gross will need to find a way for the Ags to be more competitive on the boards or they will lose more games like this.

The Ags return to the Pavilion Friday for a 7 pm game with San Diego State followed by a trip to The Farm to face the Cardinal at 2 pm on Sunday.

Go Ags!

Well, all good things have to end sometime.

The rebounding issue is weird, I would have thought that Bertch + team speed and athleticism would keep them competitive there. Still, it's good to see that they've been competitive in every game so far -- not something you see every day in the Aggie revenue sports.

Hopefully the rebounding issue was just an anomaly. The one that killed us was with about 10 seconds (or so) left, down by 2, Hofstra missed their second FT, only had one person rebounding, and she out muscled 3 Aggies. We had to foul her, she hit both FTs and that's the ball game.

Honestly, it didn't look like a physical mismatch, more of a lack of effort to rebound. I'm sure Coach Gross will make that a point of emphasis in practice this week.

It did seem like the Aggies were standing around flat-footed on quite a few of the offensive boards the Pride got. Bertsch is very quick on her spin moves to the basket with the ball but she doesn't react that quickly to the ball coming off the rim. Nina Bessolo is quick and long and seems to have a nose for the ball. She's learning quickly and I think we'll see more and more of her as she gets more experience at the college level. That should help us on the boards.

Even some of the smaller Hofstra players were aggressively getting rebounds in a crowd under the basket. The whole team needs to work on blocking out and making it a goal to be more aggressive and determined rebounding. Whenever I whine about Aggie BB teams getting hammered on the boards, Aggie6thman always reminds me that rebounding is "all heart and hard work." Just gotta get the work done.

Good point about Bessolo. There was a point in the 2nd half where she came in a got at least a few rebounds in traffic. I'm guessing that the coaching staff had told her she needed to bound the boards. This out of conference schedule should help her get accustomed to D1 ball...it'll be fun to watch her maturity.