Box Score

VT 67, WSS 43

 

BLACKSBURG, Va. - The Virginia Tech women's basketball team paired a 6:41 Winston-Salem State scoring drought with a 31-6 early second-half run to pull away from the Rams by a winning score of 67-43 on Wednesday night at Cassell Coliseum.

Up by just seven at the half against the overmatched opponent from the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference - which dressed just eight players for the game, seven of which were freshmen and all of which were 6-feet or under - the Hokies embarked on the scoring binge that saw them go 14-of-21 to build an insurmountable 32-point lead that helped them improve to 2-0 on the young season. It was the Rams' season-opener.

"I think our team tonight really had a little bit of a lapse in our defense during the first half, and we let that affect our offense," Tech head coach Beth Dunkenberger said of what began as a sloppy and turnover-marred game. "What I was pleased with, though, was to see us come out with lots of fire and intensity on that defensive end in the second half, and that fueled our run."

The Hokies did indeed come out of the locker room a different team, as they increased their field goal percentage to 51.5 after hitting just 39.3 percent in the first. They limited the Rams to just a 28.6 success rate after the break, and turned 30 Winston-Salem State turnovers into 35 points on the night.

"When you see you have such a big height advantage over a team, sometimes you try to force things that aren't there - you try to attack off of one pass when you can go three or four and have a wide-open look," Dunkenberger said. "That's just trying to do a little bit too much, too soon. Once we settled down in the second half and started moving the ball around, you saw us shoot a better percentage, and we saw our turnovers go way down."

Redshirt-junior Brittany Cook (Narrows, Va.) once again paced the Hokies in scoring with 18 points after tying a career-high with 23 on Sunday, and freshman Andrea Barbour (Charlottesville, Va.) netted 17.

Career-highs were set by Eleanor Brentnall (Melbourne, Australia) with 10 points, Utahya Drye (Durham, N.C.) with six assists and Amber Hall (Tallahassee, Fla.) with five blocks, but the most impressive stat line may have come from point guard Laura Haskins. The junior from Alexandria, Va., scored just two points, but pulled down six rebounds, tied a career-high for the second straight game with seven assists, and set a career-high with seven steals.

The game started much differently than it finished. Though they didn't attempt a free throw in the first half while turning the ball over 17 times, the Rams stayed in the game by hitting 47.6 percent of their shots and forcing Tech to lose the ball 11 of times of their own, which matched the Hokies' output from the entire game against High Point.

Winston-Salem State was within two points with 11 minutes gone by at 16-14, but that's when the Hokies used a 7-0 run to build a nine-point lead by the 7:10 mark. The Rams stayed even from that point until halftime, where the intermission score was 30-23 in favor of the Hokies.

Vontisha Woods led the Winston-Salem State attack with 17 points on 8-of-11 shooting, while Jalesa Byrd added six points with a game-high nine rebounds.

The Hokies will return to action on Monday, Nov. 19^th against the Liberty Flames at Cassell Coliseum. Tech won last year's contest in Lynchburg by a score of 55-52.