The Wisconsin women’s basketball team (4-5 overall) overcame poor shooting and rebounding efforts in the first half against St. Louis (2-6) but came back and managed to hang onto a 48-46 victory at the Kohl Center.
Senior forward Ashley Thomas provided a breakout performance, finishing with 14 points and seven rebounds, both of which were career highs.
“That was a close one, and we pulled it out,” head coach Bobbie Kelsey said, whose team committed a season-low 12 turnovers. “It very easily could have gone the opposite way. But we’re happy.”
“I’ll definitely credit my teammates for giving me the ball when I was open,” Thomas said. “And a big thing for me is just trying to slow down before making my moves, so I just tried to do that.”
The Badgers led by seven points, their largest margin in the game, with just 5:08 remaining, but the Billikens battled back. A basket by sophomore forward Lorreal Jones with 1:11 remaining in the game cut the Badgers’ lead to two at 48-46, but Wisconsin held strong defensively the rest of the way to preserve the comeback win.
St. Louis missed a jump shot with 32 seconds remaining and missed the front end of a one-and-one with 31 seconds left. UW sophomore forward Cassie Rochel—who finished with eight points off the bench—missed a free throw with 21 seconds left and allowed the Billikens one last possession to potentially win the game, but junior guard Jacy Bradley air balled an off-balance three-point attempt with four seconds left. UW junior guard Taylor Wurtz rebounded the shot and was fouled, then missed her free throw attempt, which was rebounded by Rochel to secure the win.
“I think we did a pretty good job,” Kelsey said of the defensive play on the last couple of possessions. “I think they had one clean look and didn’t knock it down. At the end, we just switched [on] every screen.”
Wisconsin shot just 6-of-24 (25 percent) in the first half and was outrebounded 28-16, including 11-1 on the offensive boards. Jones finished with 16 rebounds for the Billikens. The Badgers only put up 17 points in the messy first half, the seventh fewest in team history, and found themselves down five points at the break.
“We worked on it in practice, boxing out and turning the correct way,” Kelsey said. “It’s a little disheartening to know we worked on [rebounding] and we just didn’t execute it.”
The Badgers came out a completely different team in the second half, hitting 13-of-22 shots and proved to be much more successful at driving to the hoop.
“They did a much better job of going inside in the second half and they exploited the size differential,” Billikens’ head coach Shimmy Gray-Miller said of Wisconsin. “Their post players are bigger than ours and very skilled.”
The team’s ability to recover so strongly in the home victory especially pleased Kelsey, who notched her second career victory at the Kohl Center.
“That’s the one thing about this group that I really like and enjoy coaching,” she said. “When I’m getting on them and things aren’t going well, they stick together.”
The Badgers head to the road on Thursday as they play the 7-1 Kansas Jayhawks as part of the Big 12/Big Ten Challenge.
