The nationally ranked Rutgers women’s basketball team came to McDonough Arena this past Saturday and gave the Hoyas a taste of the talent that has earned them the second-place ranking in the Big East. Georgetown (8-12, 1-8 BE) played host to the No. 10 Scarlet Knights (16-3, 8-0 BE) and National Player of the Year Candidate Cappie Pondexter. Rutgers also brought along with them a hoard of Scarlet Knight fans and didn’t let them down with a 65-51 win.
“We have great fans,” Rutgers Head Coach C. Vivian Stringer said. “They deserve to have a great effort all the time.”
For the first 10 minutes of the game, the Hoyas looked like they had enough fight in them to keep up with the Scarlet Knights and their fans.
Sophomore guard Kristin Heidloff paced the Hoyas as they stayed with Rutgers. In the early stages of the contest, she thrived from the land of plenty, hitting all three of her three-point attempts. She finished with a season-high 17 points.
“Most of our plays have basically an option for everybody,” said Heidloff. “Rutgers just couldn’t really adjust to the baseline screens. I just had a lot of open looks tonight and was able to knock them down.”
Georgetown led 14-12 at the 10:43 mark. This would be the last time, however, that the Hoyas enjoyed the lead.
The Scarlet Knights went on a run to end the half with the help of their full-court pressure. Georgetown struggled to solve the press, committing 11 turnovers in the first half. Sophomore guard Essence Carson led the Rutgers’ surge, scoring seven of her 14 points in the final nine minutes of the half. Carson also filled the box score with five rebounds, three assists, five steals and one block.
“Not thinking about the shot really helps a lot,” Carson said following one of her higher offensive outputs of the season.
The run by Rutgers produced 16 unanswered points to go up 28-14. Freshman forward Katrina Wheeler scored the Hoyas’ only points in the final 10 minutes of the half on a three-point play to end Rutgers’ run. At halftime Georgetown was looking up from the bottom of a 30-17 deficit.
In the first half the Scarlet Knights’ defense held the Hoyas’ top two scorers, sophomore Kieraah Marlow and senior Bethany LeSueur to just one point on LeSueur’s lone foul shot. Wheeler also managed only five points. The second half did not bode well for Marlow and LeSueur as they finished the game with seven and three points respectively. Wheeler turned it on in the second half though to end with a double-double of 18 points and 12 rebounds.
“We have more than just one offensive attack,” Head Coach Terri Williams-Flourney pointed out in response to Marlow and LeSueur’s struggles. “Katrina Wheeler stepped up tonight and Kristin Heidloff stepped up. It wasn’t something that took our whole game plan away.”
The Hoyas needed all eight of their players to be scoring threats against the talented Rutgers team, however, and the play of Wheeler and three-point heroics of Heidloff were not enough to lift the Hoyas past the Scarlet Knights.
Marlow did not score until she hit two free-throws with 12 minutes left. She struggled down low against Rutgers’ six-foot-four freshman center Kia Vaughn who dominated the paint, amassing five blocks.
“That’s a big girl going up against our five-foot-eight-inch post player,” Williams-Flourney said of Vaughn. “She’s a good player. As big as she is, she better get five blocks.”
On the offensive end, Rutgers continued to increase their lead. Pondexter quietly scored a game-high 24 points for the Scarlet Knights. With under a minute to go, Rutgers held its largest lead of 20. Georgetown would score the final six points of the game as Rutgers won 65-51.
Despite the win, Rutgers Coach Stringer was not completely impressed with the play of her Scarlet Knights.
“I don’t like the way we handled the ball at the end when they started pressing. That was ridiculous. That was totally ridiculous,” Stringer said.
Stringer went on to describe her ideal team as players that were born with a relentless killer instinct. “They probably were the ones that when their moms where giving them milk they just took the bottle out of mom’s hands,” she said of such players.
Luckily for Stringer, her team didn’t need a killer instinct on Saturday, just their killer talent.
The Hoyas’ losing streak grew to six straight on Wednesday as they lost 79-62 at Pittsburgh (14-6, 5-4 BE). Marlow got back on track with a double-double scoring 17 points and grabbing 10 boards.
The women look to forget about their past six games as they face Seton Hall (6-14, 3-6 BE) at home on Saturday, Feb. 4 at 3 p.m.
