Women’s basketball dominates BGSU in quarterfinals of MAC Tournament, 81-48

Women’s basketball advanced to the semifinals of the Mid-American Conference Tournament after defeating Bowling Green 81-48 at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland.

The Chippewas will now play with regular-season MAC champions Toledo today at noon in the semi-finals.

Head coach Sue Guevara said she was happy with how her team played a balanced brand of basketball, especially defensively.

“Offensively, we put up 81 points, but I’m really proud of our defense,” she said. “We forced 34 turnovers and had 39 points off of them. I thought we were patient offensively. We had people hit shots for us.We played a zone defense. We did a lot of trapping out of the zone, and it was effective. We were able to get our hands on a lot of balls and tie up a lot of balls.”

Sophomore guard Crystal Bradford led all players in scoring. She finished with 23 points, six rebounds, four blocks and two steals. Senior guard Brandie Baker and senior forward Jessica Schroll both had nice games as well. Baker had 14 points, three rebounds to go along with eight assists.

Schroll contributed with 10 points, while junior forward Taylor Johnson finished with eight points, leading the team with eight rebounds.

The Falcons were outscored 41-24 in the second half, only managing to shoot 34.5 percent from the field, while CMU shot 43.5 percent.

An aggressive and relentless defense was present all game long forcing BGSU into 34 turnovers, thanks, in part, to 22 steals.

Guevara said she liked the amount of effort her team gave all game long and its relentlessness to get to the basket and score.

“Our players played with a great deal of passion and a lot of energy,” Guevara said. “One thing I was happy with was that we were 17-for-19 from the free-throw line. It’s tournament time right now, and it’s going to come down to defense and having people perform at the free-throw line.”

Finding many different ways to score was the story in the first half. Three-point shooting, fast break points and inside scoring were all clicking throughout the first half for the Chippewas.

Only seven turnovers were committed while forcing the Falcons into 18 turnovers with nine steals.

“They [Bowling Green] are a ball-screening team. That’s their bread and butter. We wanted to disrupt that and the only way to do that is to trap them,” Guevara said. “ It’s really hard to run a ball-screen offense against a zone defense.”

Baker, Johnson and Bradford all contributed greatly in the first half. Baker had seven points, while Johnson had six points to go along with four rebounds in the first 8:15 of the game.

Bowling Green went on a 14-3 run to end the first half, cutting the lead to only 16 after being down by as much as 27 points.

Senior guard Jalisa Olive hit a shot at the 5:37 mark, putting her team up 37-10, giving her team the largest lead of the half. She had a big second half finishing with eight points in the game.

Sophomore forward Jas’Mine Bracey finished the game with seven points and two rebounds, all in the second half.

CMU continued its strong defensive presence throughout the second half, making sure the Falcons never came close to mount any sort of comeback.