No. 11 Arizona women’s basketball team continued their unbeaten start to the season with a 78-36 win over Marist in McKale Center on Friday, Nov. 19.
“I think this is a good win for us. We’re not back in McKale for a while,” Adia Barnes said. “We did start the game off really struggling in the beginning, but I thought after that, this is a really good team when Marist is a great, well-coached team.”
Arizona’s Sam Thomas and Bendu Yeaney led way for Arizona with Thomas scoring 14 on 5-8 shooting and Yeaney scoring 11 on 4-6 shooting. Yeaney also shot a perfect 3-3 in the game from the three-point line. New transfer Koi Love grabbed a team-high 9 rebounds. Arizona ended the first quarter down 14-12 to Marist but led at the half with a score of 32-22.
“She’s being more aggressive. She’s passing the ball well, and she’s playing really well,” Shaina Pellington said about Yeaney’s performance.
Arizona’s defense remained strong, holding Marist to a 25.5 shooting percentage for the game and forcing 16 turnovers to go along with two blocks and five steals creating 23 points off of turnovers. The bench played a large part in the win, scoring 32 points. Koi Love scored nine points along with Madison Conner scoring six off the bench. Arizona is now headed to its first tournament in three years.
“I just think we were just ready defensively. She likes to have defense lineups sometime, shooting lineups so I think that lineup did what they were supposed to do,” Barnes said. “So I think just doing that, disrupting them a little bit, then we kind of kicked it in with ourselves, got our energy up and you know, defense leads to offense and that was able to help us.”
The Wildcats stand at 4-0 and will face Vanderbilt at the Paradise Jam Tournament on Friday, Nov. 26 in St. Thomas at 6:30 pm MST.
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