Spreading the wealth around
Four Panthers scored in double figures, including senior guard Dominique Sims, who scored a career-high 21 points, as the Eastern women’s basketball team rumbled past Tennessee Tech 80-59 Thursday in Cookeville, Tenn.
With the win, Eastern extended its win streak to eight games and continued its domination of the Golden Eagles with its ninth straight win against Tech.
Eastern trailed by two points with 12:23 left in the first half after the Golden Eagles started hitting three-pointers, finishing the first half 5-of-11.
Eastern head coach Brady Sallee said the defense began to adjust to Tech’s offense after an early surge by the Golden Eagles.
“Coming out of the shoot we were concentrating on keeping the ball out of the paint and keeping them from driving it,” Sallee said.
“Once we kind of felt that out a little bit, we were able to make adjustments of understanding how they were shooting it, where they were shooting it and the positions where they were shooting it from.”
Eastern made the adjustments, took the lead back and extended it to a 43-31 lead at halftime as it padded the lead by converting on 14-of-18 free throws in the first half.
“That was part of the game plan going in,” Sallee said.
“We wanted to make them make a choice with the way we were playing offense, that they’d either have to foul us or let us score.”
The Panthers came out of the locker room rusty, as they played six minutes without a point, but answered with seven unanswered points to bring the lead to double digits.
After taking the double-digit lead, Eastern rode its balanced offense the rest of the way to a 21-point win.
“We have 12 girls on our team that we have full confidence in their scoring abilities, and I think that’s what sets us apart from other teams – we aren’t a three-headed monster or we don’t have just two or four girls who do everything for us,” senior forward Maggie Kloak said.
Kloak notched her third career double-double, finishing the game as the team’s second leading scorer with 15 points and 11 rebounds.
But Sims was Eastern’s top scorer in the game, tallying 21 points.
“Tonight, (Sims) stepped up when we needed her to and giving her the ball was fun because we knew that she’d come up with bigthings,” Kloak said.
Eastern’s offense proved to be too much for Tech to handle as it followed up the 43-point first half with a 37-point second half.
“I was really happy with the way we shared the basketball and how aggressive, not only our go-to players, but everybody was,” Sallee said. “We were executing and getting our way by getting the shots that we wanted and we were knocking them down.”
Sallee said the reason for such a successful offensive night was that the team was able to outrebound the Golden Eagles and get more possessions.
“Anytime you’re going to win on the road, you’re going to have to be tough and I think that defense and rebounding are our barometer for that,” Sallee said. “To the players’ credit, they are going out and getting it done on the boards and we are winning a lot of games because of it.”
Eastern outrebounded Tech 54-41, including twenty offensive boards that gave the Panthers a fresh shot clock to run its offense.
“Those offensive boards give us another 30 seconds to get something done offensively,” Kloak said. “We’ve realized lately that rebounding wins games and we’ve really been going by that and winning games.”
Freshman guard Kelsey Wyss and freshman forward Mariah King came off of the bench and combined to score 22 of Eastern’s 25 bench points in the game.
Eastern improves to 13-8, 9-1 in the Ohio Valley Conference. It will look to improve its OVC record and extend its win streak Saturday against Jacksonville State at 2 p.m. in Jacksonville, Ala.
Alex McNamee can be reached at 581-7944
Spreading the wealth around
Senior forward Maggie Kloak lines up a free throw against Tennessee-Martin Saturday evening in Lantz Arena. (Audrey Sawyer/The Daily Eastern News)
