For consecutive games, the Falcon women’s basketball team surrendered a first-half lead. This one just so happened to cost them their first loss of the early season to a non-conference opponent, the Canisius Golden Griffins, by a final score of 71-57 at the Stroh Center. This tough loss drops the Falcons to 3-1 and improves Canisius to 2-1.
The Falcons scoring was led by junior guard, Sydney Lambert, with 12 points on 5-of-15 shooting. Sophomore center, Jane Uecker, also added 10 points along with eight rebounds.
The Golden Griffins were led by Sara Hinriksdottir with 20 points, 7 assists and 8 rebounds, and by Maria Welch who contributed 12 points and 7 rebounds to their winning performance.
Following the Falcons previous game where they surrendered a first-half lead, they seemed to have done the same in this contest. The Falcons were outscored 36-18 in the second half and just could not seem to recover like the way they did on the road versus the Robert Morris Colonials three days prior.
“Our third quarter has to improve significantly,” head coach Jennifer Roos said. “If you want to pinpoint one area where we need to improve, that’s it. They jumped out to an 11-0 lead in the first five minutes (of the third quarter), and we just could never counter from that. And then we’re at Robert Morris and we only score 4 points (in the third quarter) and hold on to win in OT. We’ve been outscored by about 30 points in the third quarter (this season), and something’s got to change.”
The Falcons got out to a nice first half which saw them leading at the break by a score of 39-35 on 13-of-32 shooting. But once the second half started, things just didn’t seem right. Bowling Green could only muster up 18 points on 7-of-32 shooting from the field. All while conceding 71 total points to the Golden Griffins.
“We didn’t shoot the ball well,” Roos said. “Excited we got shots, but we didn’t shoot the ball well. Missed a handful of layups, missed 7-of-35 at the arc, wide-open threes, ran some plays wrong. So it’s not what we had anticipated. Our team has been playing with a lot of energy, really good chemistry. They wanted to play hard in front of our home crowd but we just could not get the crowd going because we were missing shots, shots that we’ve made in practice and in the previous three games.”
Following this loss, the Falcons traveled over this Thanksgiving holiday break to Boca Raton, Florida to compete in the FAU Thanksgiving Tournament.
