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Women’s basketball endures another loss |
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Tuesday, 12 February 2008 |
 The ASU women's basketball team leaves the court after a narrow loss to Davidson College Saturday. Photo by Holt Menzies
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by ASHLEY DAVIS
Sports Reporter
Last Saturday the Appalachian State University women’s basketball team experienced a heartbreaking 67-66 loss to conference rival Davidson College.
The Mountaineers drew first blood with scores coming from seniors Courtney Cunningham and Whitney Tossie. Going against what the statistics and records predicted and even the team’s expectations, the early scores evolved into a 40-19 lead with just over four minutes left on the clock until half-time.
Yet
with the game beginning to look like a blowout, Davidson held the
Mountaineers from scoring in the last five minutes of the half, going
on a 10-point push and closing the lead to only 11 points entering
halftime.
Entering the second half, three of Appalachian’s key players, Brittney
Mixon, GiGi Thomas and Tossie, had accumulated three personal fouls
each.
Just over six minutes into the second half, all three players had
allotted another foul, taking away from much of the aggressiveness the
team had established at the beginning of the game.
With Davidson beginning to push their score to meet Appalachian’s, the arena turned seemingly into a pressure-cooker.
Senior Danielle Hemerka led Davidson in the second half scoring nine
points, followed closely by junior Kelly Gassie, who scored six.
“We made critical turnovers,” Shuler said. “We were doing a good job
defensively though, making them work for everything they got.
[Davidson] is just a great shooting team, a great scoring team.”
With four minutes and four seconds left on the clock, Davidson had evened the score 59-59.
After two successful free throws by Tossie, Appalachian maintained the lead.
With a minute left in the game, Appalachian’s 65-63 lead looked almost
cemented until, in the final thirty seconds, two good free throws by
Wildcat sophomore Alex Thompson again leveled the score at 65-65.
It was only in the final two seconds that junior Mercedes Robinson found a two-point goal to finalize the score at 67-66.
“That’s a tough one to swallow,” Shuler said. “When you look back,
there’s 10 different ways we lost the ballgame and the only person we
can blame is ourselves.”
Appalachian’s next game will be at Furman University Wednesday.
“Anything’s possible, especially with this team,” Tossie said. “We’re
hungry to win. We’re the ones that have nothing to lose now, so it’s
other teams that have to look out for us.”
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