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Penguins rally late but fall to Loyola
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Youngstown State’s Kenya Middlebrooks (5) fi ghts for a loose ball against Loyola defenders Ayrealle Beavers (24) and Abby Skube (34) during the fi rst half of their basketball game Thursday at YSU’s Beeghly Center. The Penguins came up short against the Ramblers, losing 82-77.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH
Penguins rally late but fall to Loyola
By Joe Scalzo
YOUNGSTOWN
Youngstown State women’s basketball coach Bob Boldon doesn’t like moral victories or cupcake questions, so when he was asked after Thursday’s 82-77 loss to Loyola whether his team could have caught the Ramblers if it had another two minutes, he batted it away like a mosquito in front of his face.
“We could have played another 20 minutes and I don’t know if we would have caught them,” Boldon said. “If we played another five minutes, they probably would have got to 100. I don’t know what we would have got to.”
The Penguins lost for a very simple reason, he said.
They deserved to.
“Basketball is a very honest game,” he said. “You get largely what you deserve.”
Playing a Loyola team that had lost seven of its last nine, the Penguins got themselves in a big hole in the first half, shooting just 25.8 percent from the field (including 3 of 18 from the 3-point line) to fall behind 35-24 at halftime.
The Ramblers (7-9, 2-3 Horizon League) stretched that lead to 18 with 17:23 left and it took the Penguins 16 more minutes just to get back within single digits.
By then, it was too late.
“We’ve got to be happy about [how we finished] but then again, we can’t get too excited because we should have done it a lot sooner,” said YSU’s Kelse Fickiesen, who had eight points and eight rebounds off the bench. “We should have done that from the start of the game.
“We can’t change that now. We’ve got to move forward.”
Simone Law scored 21 points and grabbed 10 rebounds for Loyola, with 18 of those points coming in the second half.
“She did a nice job,” Boldon said of Law. “She made some good one-on-one moves and when we tried to double her, she passed out of it. When we played one-on-one, she scored over us.
“Obviously we couldn’t guard her. We tried our best.”
Monica Albano added 17 points, Troy Hambric had 12 and Ayrealle Beavers 10 for the Ramblers, who held a dominating 48-32 edge on the boards.
Brandi Brown scored 26 points — 20 in the second half — for the Penguins (8-7, 2-2), while Kenya Middlebrooks, Heidi Schlegel and Monica Touvelle all scored nine.
The 82 points were the second-most scored against YSU this season — Northern Iowa scored 90 on Nov. 26 — and were a season-high by Loyola, which entered the game averaging 63 points per contest.
“They exploited some of our weaknesses,” Boldon said. “They did a really nice job executing offensively and we tried a number of different things and never could quite find the answer.
“We played an entire game and only had seven steals, so it’s not like we disrupted what they were trying to do.”
With a 2 p.m. Saturday game against Illinois-Chicago looming, the Penguins must quickly shake off the loss and move forward.
“You go in and game plan as best you can and sometimes you’re successful and sometimes their stuff is better than your stuff,” Boldon said. “Tonight, their offense was significantly better than our defense.”