SENATOBIA — As head coach Brent Harris put it, Monday night “was a tale of two halves” for the Southwest Lady Bears as they opened their 2013-14 basketball season with a 73-62 loss on the road at Northwest Mississippi Community College. The Lady Bears built a 13-point lead in the first half only to see it disappear in the second.
The first half was controlled almost entirely by Southwest. The Lady Bears went on a 26-11 run that put Southwest up 26-15 with 3:33 left in the first half.
That apparently lit a fire in the Lady Rangers as they went on a run of their own, 17-5, to close the half. A Carshava Sutton bucket with one second left on the clock capped the run and drew the hosts to within one point, 33-32, at the end of the first half of play.
The second half belonged to the Lady Rangers.
Outscoring Southwest 16-7 to open the final stanza, Northwest took a 50-40 lead on Sutton’s basket with 9:59 left to play. A Katrina Littlepage layup shortened the Lady Bears’ deficit to four, 50-46, with 9:04 to go in the game, but that was as close as they could get the rest of the way.
Young hit a shot to give the Lady Rangers a 69-51 lead with 2:58 on the clock and they coasted to an 11-point victory.
“That last three minutes of the first half kind of set the momentum for the second half,” said Harris.
The second-year coach said the Lady Bears were hurt by turnovers and fouls, but faulted sloppy defense for Southwest’s demise.
“The fouling bothered me more than the turnovers because (with) the way Northwest plays, you’re going to turn the ball over,” Harris said. “Us playing defense with our feet instead of our hands, that bothers me. We kind of lost our mojo there for a minute, got down and couldn’t get it put back together. Hopefully we can turn it around on Thursday.”
Despite the loss, Harris said he did see some positives in the game.
“We had some freshmen play a lot of good minutes,” Harris said. “I thought Dimaya McCullough did pretty well. I thought Talisa Sherman didn’t have many negative plays. That may be the end of the positives. We played pretty hard, but didn’t always play pretty smart.”
Levy led the Lady Bears with 12 points in the game. Madison Mault was also in double figures with 11 points. Sherman picked up nine points while Cortney Epting and McCullough both tallied seven.
Littlepage recorded six points while Tee Myers had five, Raven Reyes had three points to go along with eight rebounds and Elayne Robinson had two points. The Lady Bears made 18 of 30 free throws.
Northwest’s Sutton led all scorers with 24 points. Young and Mays were also in double figures with 14 and 12 points, respectively. The Lady Rangers made good on 16 of 29 attempts from the charity stripe.
The Lady Bears make their home debut Thursday night when they host Bishop State. Tipoff is set for 5:30 p.m.
