Women’s basketball lose close one in season opener

The Laurier women’s basketball team opened their 2017-18 season Saturday afternoon with a 65-60 loss on the road against the Brock Badgers.

Coming off of a strong preseason – where Laurier managed to win four of their six games – the team was looking to keep the momentum rolling going into the regular season.

Unfortunately, the team started the game on the wrong foot, going down by eight points after the first quarter. However, they were able to bounce back with a very strong second quarter, putting them in the lead by one point at halftime.

The lead would stay in Laurier’s favour for most of the third quarter, until Brock was finally able to claw back and regain control of the game. The Badgers – who now have a 2-0 record to start their season – didn’t look back from there and held the lead until the final buzzer.

“I’d say overall we were pretty disappointed with our effort.,” head coach, Paul Falco said, regarding the team’s loss. “Obviously you have the first game of the season circled on the calendar, it was a game that we were thinking about and talking about for a while now.”

“I didn’t think our overall effort was as good as it could have been. I thought at times Brock out competed us in certain areas of the game.”

“We need to become a better rebounding team,” Falco stated, hinting at prospective areas of improvement.

“We gave up too many offensive rebounds and too many layups inside. On the flip side, we missed over a dozen layups that you can’t afford to miss, and our execution on the offensive end was poor,” he continued.

Nicole Morrison and Irena Rynkiewicz controlled the offence for the Golden Hawks, contributing 14 points each, while chipping in with four and three assists respectively.

Despite the loss, Falco was still able to pull out one positive from his team’s performance.

“We played a pretty good second quarter, we came back and took the lead on the last play of the first half. We showed signs of playing like the team that we can be,” he said. “We expect to be competing in the OUA-West division with the top teams.”

“We’ve had some work to do. We’ve gone through some injuries in the preseason, which has maybe hurt our growth a little bit,” Falco said. “But we need to compete just a little harder than we did on Saturday to be able to play with the top teams in the province and the top teams in the OUA-West.”

The team will be looking to improve on last season’s performance, in which they lost in the quarterfinals to eventual champions Carleton.

You can catch the women’s basketball team during their home opener on Nov. 10, when they play host to the University of Ottawa at 6 p.m.