Lavender leads No. 3 Ohio State past Wisconsin

COLUMBUS (AP) — Coming off a devastating loss and down by eight points, No. 3 Ohio State had a players-only meeting at halftime of Sunday’s game with Wisconsin.

The Buckeyes obviously figured out some things.

Jantel Lavender scored 16 of her 23 points the rest of the way, helping to turn a slow start into a 70-55 victory in the Big Ten opener for both teams.

“This team has had a leadership issue. It got determined at halftime,” coach Jim Foster said. “Coaches can talk until they’re blue in the face. We weren’t ready at 9 o’clock this morning to play this game; I had that discussion with them. But at halftime the players had a discussion. I didn’t go in for a while because it was just time for them to step up.”

The result was a 50-point second half in which the Buckeyes (9-1) doubled their field goal percentage to 48 percent.

In addition, they prevented Wisconsin’s deliberate, patient offense from finding open shooters, and rattled the Badgers (7-2) into 11 turnovers that resulted in 15 important points.

“We had to come to a consensus with each other about who we want to be and what we want to do,” said Lavender, who had 10 rebounds and three assists. “Once that was [decided] everybody was on the same page. We just knew that defense was where we needed to pick it up and everybody came out extremely hard and we got stops.”

The Buckeyes, coming off an 83-67 loss at No. 11 Duke on Wednesday in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge, led 2-0 and then not again until Lavender scored with 9:38 left. Brittany Johnson scored 16 points and Tayler Hill and Samantha Prahalis each added 11 for the Buckeyes, who have won 15 straight home games and 15 in a row over Wisconsin.

Prahalis, who was second in the nation at 9.8 assists a game coming in and finished with six, said the difference was definitely defense for the Buckeyes, chasing a sixth consecutive Big Ten title.

“We got more intense,” she said. “Like Jantel said, we just came together and [asked], like, ’What do we want to be?’ I know we lost the other night, but good teams sometimes need a wakeup call. We determined what we wanted to be and we just came out more intense.”

Alyssa Karel and Teah Gant both had 10 points for the Badgers, who couldn’t have asked for much more in the first half.