Home still not kind to 'Dogs
The Bulldogs drop their fourth straight at Save Mart Center
By NATHAN HATHAWAY
Just when things were looking dark for the Fresno State women’s
basketball team, the lights came on for the Bulldogs. Too bad they didn’t
stay on for very long.
The Bulldogs showed flashes of the team they were in the beginning of
the season in Thursday’s 63-59 loss to Rice in front of 3,527 at
the Save Mart Center, but in the end, Fresno State left the team with
heads hanging — a shadow of the team that started the season 6-0.
“We’ve got to learn to bring it. We’ve got to learn
to play,” said junior forward Amy Parrish, who led the Bulldogs
with 20 points. “We’re not where we were at the beginning
of the year. We’re going downhill.
Amy Parrish scored a team-high 20 points for the Bulldogs Thursday
night, but the team lost it’s fourth straight game at home.
Photo by Joseph Vasquez |
We need to pick it up. We’ve got to keep climbing, and we’re
not doing it at the pace we need to. We need to do it a lot faster.”
After trailing by as much as nine early in the game, Fresno State pieced
together a 12-0 run that saw the Bulldogs take their first lead of the
game with just less than three minutes to go in the first half.
During the stretch, the Bulldogs held Rice without a field goal for nearly
nine minutes.
“On the court, we talk to ourselves,” said sophomore Jasmine
Plummer, who scored 14 for the Bulldogs. “It’s embarrassing
when people just come in and just score on our court without us fighting.
So we just thought buckle down, play defense, show them how we play.”
It was a drastic change from the opening minutes.
The Owls dominated defensively on the inside early in the game, blocking
four shots and pulling down 13 defensive rebounds in the opening 17 minutes.
All-WAC forward Lauren Neaves led the effort for Rice (10-7, 3-3 WAC),
pulling down nine rebounds and blocking two shots in the first half.
“[Lauren’s] big. She’s got decent mobility for a big
kid. She’s got long arms,” Rice coach Christy McKinney said.
“She gives a lot of people trouble inside.”
And of course it didn’t help at all that Fresno State turned over
the ball 10 times in the first half, and 23 times in the game.
The Bulldogs played hard enough to put themselves in a position to win
with the game winding down, but a crucial no-call on a 3-point attempt
by Kendra Walker-Roche with about two seconds left and the Bulldogs down
62-59 sealed the win for the Owls.
“I’m not going to say anything about the officiating, but
my shirt was tucked in when the play started and it was all the way out
when it was done,” Walker-Roche said, insinuating she was held on
the shot. “My jersey was all the way untucked.”
But the Bulldogs squandered chances to seize control even before that.
After a flagrant foul call against Rice’s Eshombi Singleton with
about five and a half minutes left in the game and the Bulldogs down by
four, Fresno State had two free throws and the ball, but got only one
point out of the possession, and Rice scored the next five points to extend
the lead to eight.
“That was very critical because of momentum,” Johnson-Klein
said. “Basketball is a game of runs.”
With forward Aritta Lane held in check — the senior had three points
and took only three shots in the game — Plummer gave herself a birthday
present and turned in her best performance of the season.
The loss drops Fresno State (11-5, 3-4 WAC) into eighth place in the conference
and extends the Bulldogs’ home losing streak to four games heading
into Saturday’s game against Tulsa (12-4, 4-2 WAC).
“You would think a home-court advantage at some point would begin
to be a factor, and it’s not,” Johnson-Klein said.
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