The Falcon women’s basketball team faced a big challenge Wednesday morning in the form of Big East and in-state foe; the Xavier Musketeers. The team seemed to not be discouraged from the power conference squad as they defeated them at the Stroh Center 63-53.
The Falcons were led by a nice bench performance from sophomore guard Caterrion Thompson with 19 points on six of nine shooting and five of those buckets being three-pointers. Junior guard Cecil Andrea added 14 points and junior guard Carly Santoro contributed 12 points as well.
The Musketeers were led by A’riana Gray and Princess Stewart with 10 points apiece. But these performances could not get the job done for Xavier as they drop to a 4-2 record on the early campaign.
The game was not as close as the final score indicates as the Falcons soared to a 21-9 point lead after the first quarter which led to a comfortable 38-24 lead at the half, big thanks to 8-of-13 three-point shooting in the first half and stifling defense.
“Take away the first two possessions where we turned it over (and we did fine).” Falcons head coach Jennifer Roos said. “But it was the start that we wanted and that set the tempo. We knew that they had played more recently than we had so we wanted to push the tempo as much as we could to start the game.”
The team’s flight to victory was fueled by third quarter three-point buckets by both junior guard Sydney Lambert and senior guard Haley Puk to assemble a 22 point differential between the Falcons and Xavier. The Musketeers by no means helped their cause by shooting 3-of-12 from the field in the third.
The Falcons led by 20 with only 5 minutes remaining in the contest and saw that lead cut in half by a late Xavier run that seemed to have come far too late.
“Our team responded well.” Roos said. “We had several days to prepare for us and get better internally. We had a day off on Sunday and then came back and just really worked hard to prepare for Xavier. This is a talented Xavier team and we got lots of contributions from different kids. When you have five different kids able to shoot from beyond the arc and we had lots of penetration and made the extra pass today. So I thought our kids really did a good job of executing.”
The team will return back to the action for a Saturday road contest against the South Dakota State Jackrabbits. The Falcons look to continue their perfect record on the road and continue their winning ways.
