It’s a win for the LSU women’s basketball team that could make its two-game losing streak a distant memory. The 12th-ranked Lady Tigers beat the second-ranked Texas Lady Longhorns at the PMAC yesterday afternoon, 70-65. After the game, Head Coach Kim Mulkey said the team showed a little extra than it had in its two losses to Kentucky and Vanderbilt this month.
“We were tough tonight, start to finish. Even if we would have lost, we were tougher than we were a couple games ago,” Mulkey said.
Junior guard Mikaylah Williams was the team’s leading scorer with 20 points in 38 minutes. She said toughness is what the team has focused on since those back-to-back losses.
“That’s something we’ve really instilled and enforced these last couple days. And that’s something that, even when we go in those little huddles during the game, be tough. Get those rebounds. No second chance opportunities. Just something that we try to enforce and influence. We try not to make those same mistakes as we did in those losses and try to really have it in our heads to do the right things in those big moments,” Williams said.
Sophomore guard Jada Richard added 10 points in 25 minutes. She said the two losses exposed some flaws that she feels that the team has ironed out. She says now the job is to keep that momentum going after beating the No. 2 team in the country.
“We’ve worked hard these past couple of days. We’ve really been grinding in practice. We’ve been coming up here on our own as a team, just trying to fix those little mistakes that’s causing us to lose those games. So, it’s a big win, but, I mean, the job’s not done. We still want to have dreams and aspirations for a national championship,” Richard said.
It won’t get any easier for the Lady Tigers as they try to make it three in a row, as their next opponent is the fifth-ranked Oklahoma Lady Sooners. They’ll have a whole week to prepare – the game is Sunday afternoon in Norman; tipoff is at 2 pm.