Spring Break
OSU earns Pac-10 win over Arizona
Beavers put Thursday night loss to Arizona State behind as they defeat Arizona for their first conference win
Maria Bruggere
Issue date: 1/12/09 Section: Sports
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It was a rough night Thursday at the Legendary Gill Coliseum for Beaver basketball. The women were shut down by Arizona State 36-61. Senior guard Mercedes Fox-Griffin led the team with a mere 10 points during her 33 minutes of play. Oregon State was killed offensively and defensively while the Sun Devils scored shot after shot, raking in the points.
"Arizona State is very aggressive and very physical and we knew that," head coach LaVonda Wagner said. "We understand how they like to play. We knew we had to handle that and you want to be able to handle that at home. We just were not able to handle that physical play."
Arizona State put the pressure on for the entire game, and senior center Sybil Dosty led with 12 points and seven rebounds. The Beavers fell behind early in the game and never managed to catch up and get back into the swing of things.
"We did the things that we needed to do, but unfortunately we got the ball and we did not make the right decision with the basketball and we did not make our shots," Wagner said.
However, it didn't take long for the Beavers to clean up their mistakes from the Arizona State game. Going into Saturday's game, the Beavers were hungry for a Pac-10 win, and they were successful in taking down the Wildcats in a 68-43 victory.
The leader of the team, Fox-Griffin, had 11 points, six assists and was 5-6 at the free throw line. Senior center Tiffany Ducker also had a great game with 12 points, nine rebounds and three steals while sophomore center Alex Mitchell added eight rebounds of her own.
"I would like to congratulate my team and my staff on the first Pac-10 win of the season," Wagner said. "It was a really good game. We executed, we defended and we rebounded the basketball. We did all the things that we talked about that we needed to do in order to be successful. We had to come back and play Oregon State basketball, and I felt like we did that for 40 solid minutes."
Oregon State controlled the game from the beginning and never let Arizona take it away. The Beavers were aggressive offensively and defensively with 10 steals and only 12 turnovers.
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