Jefferson Hagen
MacEwan Athletics
ABBOTSFORD, B.C. – Without any of their bigs due to injuries and illness, the Griffins women's basketball team was predictably in tough against a UFV team that has six players at least 6-feet tall.
Samantha Hickey (6-foot-1) and Sarah Burnell (6-foot) were unavailable to play this weekend, while Maggie Smith (5-foot-11) has yet to play this season due to an injury.
So, the news that the Cascades scored more than half of their points in the paint (44) during an 80-41 victory comes as no surprise.
"They're a good team, they've got some pretty veteran, experienced players," said Griffins head coach Katherine Adams. "When Maddy Gobeil got going early, it took us a minute to realize that here's a Canada West all-star doing her thing and scoring efficiently on us. But I thought that we adjusted well. We were undersized. They're a big team, a physical team and we were outmatched a little bit size-wise.
"So, we tried to adjust and do some things to manage that. But ultimately, they had 44 points in the paint tonight. Sometimes you do what you can."
With the result, the Griffins fall to 0-13 on the season, while the Cascades improve to 10-5.
Gobeil paced UFV with 26 points, while Julia Tuchscherer chipped in 13 and both Miah Schuurman and Bernie Leda had 10.
MacEwan, hit with a wave of injuries, had just eight players available for the match. Toni Gordon led the way with 12 points, while Sofia Makinen chipped in 11.
"You make due and you do the best you can," said Adams. "We tried a couple things to see if we could manage their inside presence some. I thought at moments we did a good job and forced some people to take outside shots and forced the people we wanted to be taking shots to take shots.
"We held on for kind of as long as we could. We tried to put up a sustained defensive effort, but with eight players we ran out of gas a little bit."
The teams will meet again on Saturday (4 p.m. MT, Canada West TV).
"A lesson for us to take into tomorrow's game: we shot 45 per cent (15 of 33) from inside the three-point arc today," said Adams. "I think we got a little bit happy just settling for outside shots. We were only 2-for-23 from the three-point line, so I think that's a big lesson.
"We were impactful when we got to the paint. It's something we can definitely build on in creating more scoring opportunities tomorrow."
