Brock women punch ticket to nationals
The Brock women’s basketball team celebrates Wednesday night. Photo by Mackenzie Gerry.
The visiting Brock Badgers women’s basketball team continued its second-half magic Wednesday, outscoring the Western Mustangs 41-25 to erase a 12-point deficit and record a 69-65 victory in the Ontario University Athletics’ semifinals.
Brock earns a berth in the national championships with the victory and advances to play the Ryerson Rams Saturday in the OUA championship.
“It didn’t go according to plan,” said Brock head coach Mike Rao, who this week was named the OUA coach of the year. “We had a rough first half — we were down 12 — with a lot of turnovers and we weren’t boarding the ball too well. They got too many second chances.”
All that changed in the second half.
“We cleaned it up a lot,” Rao said. “I was happy with that and we finally made a couple of shots. Then things started to fall for us.”
Rao felt the key to victory was keeping First Team All-Star Maddy Horst in check. Horst was held to four points on 2-18 shooting.
“We denied her all over the court, we did a lot of good things, we switched on her, we switched on high ball screens, we made her play and she wasn’t used to that,” he said. “She took a few ill-conceived shots, we got the board and then we went the other way.”
Top performers for Brock in the victory were: Jess Morris with 19 points on 6-12 shooting, including 3-3 from beyond the arc; OUA Player of the Year and First Team All-Star Melissa Tatti with 17 points on 8-15 shooting; Second Team All-Star Sam Keltos with 17 points and seven rebounds; Sofia Croce with 12 points and 10 rebounds; and, Kristin Gallant with three points and nine boards.
“We had a pretty good shooting game and Sof (Sofia) was very good,” Rao said. “Jess scored big, Sam scored big and so did Melissa. We had four people in the teens and that’s pretty good.”
Top scorers for Western were Elizabeth Leblanc (24), Julia Curran (19) and Jenna Lawrence (11).
At no time did Rao think his squad would be playing for an OUA championship and heading to the 2019-20 U SPORTS championship.
“Of course not, but I am happy with this team because we progressed and we got better as the time went on,” he said. “We are consistently better and if we would have lost one of these games and it would have ended, I would have been happy because there was progress.”
Rao is thrilled to be heading to nationals March 5-8 in Ottawa.
“I don’t think anyone expected us to get there, but we got there,” he said. “What else can I say? We did it.”
First up is Saturday’s OUA final at Ryerson. Ryerson defeated Ottawa 84-76 in the other semifinal Wednesday night.
Brock split its season series with Ryerson, winning 68-58 in its home opener on Oct 26 and losing 81-66 on Feb. 1.
“They are very good and I think they are one of the best teams in the country,” Rao said. “They beat Ottawa, they beat Carleton and they’ve beaten a lot of good teams. They have a lot of great players and we are going to show up and see what we can do.”