For the second time in the past three years, the Colorado Mesa women\u2019s basketball team has ended Lubbock Christian\u2019s season in the NCAA Tournament. The No. 3-seeded Mavericks cruised to an 80-45 victory Friday over the Lady Chaps in the first round of the South Central Regional in Division II women\u2019s basketball tournament at Kitty Magee Arena in Denton, Texas.<\/p>\n
Colorado Mesa led wire-to-wire in the blowout victory, their 31st in a row. The nationally third-ranked Mavericks opened a 10-point advantage in the first quarter, and after sustaining a second-quarter mini rally that pulled seventh-seeded Lubbock Christian within five points, CMU was able to rebound and once again pull ahead by 10 points heading to the locker at halftime. Colorado Mesa led by double digits for the duration of the second half en route to the dominating victory.<\/p>\n
The Lady Chaps\u2019 defensive game plan Friday largely revolved around limiting senior Olivia Reed Thyne\u2019s scoring impact. Lubbock Christian threw double- and triple-teams at the three-time defending Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference player of the year all game, eliminating easy layup attempts in the paint but in turn freeing CMU\u2019s other players for open shots around the floor, which the Mavericks were keen to cash in on.<\/p>\n
CMU shot 33 3-pointers ion the game, connecting on 13 of them for a 39% shooting clip. Two Mavericks \u2014 junior Brooke Eyre and redshirt junior Tamryn Blom \u2014 knocked down a pair of 3s, freshman Hallie Clark bagged three shots from beyond the arc and redshirt sophomore Mason Rowland netted a team-high four 3-pointers.<\/p>\n
Reed Thyne also had a great game in spite of drawing constant defensive attention. By the end of the third quarter, the senior had already completed her 20th double-double of the season. She finished with 20 points and 14 rebounds, most and second-most on the team, respectively.<\/p>\n
Eyre finished with a team-high 16 boards, Rowland had 19 points on 7 of 12 shooting and Clark added 13 points on 5 of 15 shooting.<\/p>\n
Ball security was the name of the game for the Mavericks in the win. Colorado Mesa only turned the ball over six times, and when they forced turnovers defensively, they racked up 12 points off turnovers, as opposed to only four for the Lady Chaps.<\/p>\n
\u201cDefensively, we wanted to contest more shots, do a better job of helping and recovering, just making sure we contest everything and crashing the boards more,\u201d Reed Thyne said on the team\u2019s defensive strategy. \u201cWe came out and we did that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mesa also vastly outscored Lubbock Christian on second-chance points, 19-2, thanks in part to out-rebounding their competitors 50-28. Cleaning up the boards, and, by extension, playing stout defense, has been a point of emphasis for the Mavericks all season long, as they are holding visitors to only 51.6 points per game on the year \u2014 a mark that actually went down after Friday\u2019s postseason victory.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were just getting after it on the defensive end,\u201d Rowland said. \u201cMaking our defense turn into offense has been a huge key of ours throughout the whole year.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the win, the Mavericks advanced to the second round of the regional, where they await No. 7 Texas-Tyler, which knocked off second-seeded West Texas A&M in the first round. West Texas A&M, incidentally, was the only squad to defeat Colorado Mesa this season. The Mavericks dropped their fourth game of the season to the Buffs, 85-70, in Canyon, Texas.<\/p>\n
Tip-off for today\u2019s regional semifinal from Denton is slated for 4 p.m.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to go in with confidence and leave it all out there, no matter who the matchup is,\u201d Reed Thyne said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the second time in the past three years, the Colorado Mesa women\u2019s basketball team has ended Lubbock…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":657695,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3723],"tags":[4244,7,217,84692,231,772,1544],"class_list":{"0":"post-657694","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-american-football","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-college-basketball","11":"tag-lubbock-christian-chaparrals-and-lady-chaps","12":"tag-ncaa","13":"tag-ncaa-basketball","14":"tag-ncaab"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116226667518988418","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/657694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/657695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=657694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=657694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}