After missing another opportunity to get a coveted top-two bid with a loss against Portland on Saturday, the Cougs will have a pair of favorable opponents this week at home. WSU hosts San Francisco on Thursday and stays in Pullman for a Saturday morning matchup with Saint Mary’s.
Both opponents remain within range of WSU in the West Coast Conference standings, with USF being in sixth place and SMC being in fourth, but the Cougs have already beaten both teams this season and in relatively comfortable fashion.
On Jan. 16, the Cougs took care of business in San Francisco with a convincing 74-58 win. The win was important in the midst of the team’s most exhausting stretch of the season, playing five games in nine days to round out the month. The Cougs will need a similarly strong performance this time around after losing to the Pilots.
In the first matchup, the Cougs started off blazing hot, outscoring the Dons 25-8 in the first quarter alone. The team’s early lights out shooting, going 9-18 on three-pointers, pushed the WSU lead to 21 by halftime. The early offensive explosion made it difficult for USF to comeback, even as the Cougs’ shooting cooled off by the end of the game.
The team attempted a season-high 32 three-pointers against USF and finished shooting 31.3% from that range. Forward Tara Wallack and guard Jenna Villa led the team in scoring, with 16 and 14 points, respectively. Villa went 4-10 from three, her highest volume of the season.
Despite losing their rebound battle, the other key to the first win for the Cougs was on the defensive side of the ball, as the team racked up 17 combined blocks and steals. Wallack had two blocks and two steals, while now injured center Alex Covill had four blocks and guard Astera Tuhina had four steals.
WSU also limited USF to 36% from the field and 18% from beyond the arc.
Head coach Kamie Ethridge said the first USF game is how she wants to see her team play, hitting open shots when they have the opportunity.
“I thought that’s how we should shoot,” Ethridge said. “We made open shots and quite frankly I keep telling the team we have to make open shots. We missed a bunch of open shots against Portland at the start of the second half. Those shots against San Francisco, we don’t want to live on them, but we certainly have to be confident in the shots that we’re getting and shoot them up. Again that’s going to be our strength if we can just put some points on the board and we got to be solid defensively.”
USF did not have a lot of positives against WSU, but if there was one positive, it was the play of guard Angeliki Ziaka, who scored 20 points and grabbed four rebounds. The Dons will need a performance like that from her again, or another bench piece, as the team has relied heavily on guard Freja Worth all season.
The senior from Sweden is averaging 15.9 points and 5.8 rebounds, while shooting 34.4% from three. Worth leads the team in minutes and has scored 20 or more points in seven games this season. The Cougs should be encouraged by their defense limiting her to 10 points previously, but she is prone to go off at any moment.
Ethridge said the Dons are a post-oriented and isolation-heavy team that could present problems for the Cougs, but she liked the signs she saw defensively in the first game.
WSU follows Thursday with the Saint Mary’s matchup, an important matchup in the standings as the team’s senior night. Wallack is the only senior on the WSU roster.
Ethridge said she wants as much support as possible on Saturday and she has tried to express the importance of playing for seniors to the rest of her team.
“Your heart aches for Tara and trying to get her to win as many games as she possibly can and to get to play in that jersey as many games she possibly can,” Ethridge said. “So it is a big weekend and honestly that final on Saturday to honor her, it just doesn’t get any better than getting to honor your seniors.”
The Cougs won the first matchup in large part due to owning the boards. WSU outrebounded Saint Mary’s 42-26, an impressive showing for a team that has consistently struggled in that department this season and has a margin of -3.1. The Gaels are the worst rebounding team in the conference, averaging just 31.2 rebounds and 7.9 offensive rebounds.
WSU has also been prone to win games the most by getting short offensive outbursts that blow the game open. The team opened the second half with an 11-0 run and 4-7 three-point shooting in the third quarter to propel themselves to a 66-57 victory.
Saint Mary’s sits just 1.5 games back from WSU though and has remained in the top five of the standings for much of the conference schedule. The guard duo of Kennedy Johnson and Maia Jones could be difference-makers in what was a relatively competitive matchup the first time around.
With just three games left, Ethridge said “everybody is clawing for seeding in the tournament,” a reason for WSU to keep fighting until the end.
