Middle Tennessee women’s basketball (14-6, 6-1 CUSA) found themselves in a loud back and forth with LA Tech (11-8, 4-4 CUSA), with the Lady Raiders prevailing 61-43.
The half-packed Murphy Center still brought plenty of noise from the ref’s whistles to the fans, making their presence felt.
Jalynn Gregory started the game by setting the MTSU all time three-point record within the first minute of the game. Late in the contest Gregory made history once again, becoming the 13th Lady Raider to score 1,500 career points.
“The three point record, it doesn’t just come from me of course I have to make the shot, but it comes from my teammates getting me open and just them passing me the ball, Nas [Anastasiia Boldyreva] working down low, drawing so many people and then the kick out,” Gregory said.
The rest of the first half was a whistle filled affair with 19 fouls called, nine on the Blue Raiders and 10 on the Lady Techsters.
LA Tech came out defensively with a full court press turned into a two-three zone in the half court. Middle Tennessee handled the early pressure well, going into the half with a 32-24 lead.
“People think that is the solution to guard us, in all reality we have had multiple games where we played against the zone and we beat it,” Gregory said. “In the games we have lost against zone it’s because we beat ourselves.”
While MTSU ultimately prevailed, the Lady Techsters slowed down the Lady Raiders with the press at times and forced the team to use the full shot clock. At one point, LA Tech caused a back court violation from the Lady Raiders.
“We didn’t do a good job at times handling it, we got too good of shooters for people to play a zone,” head coach Rick Insell said. “We have got to do a better job passing the ball, passing quicker, passing to the right man, we missed some open three-point shooters two or three times.”
The Blue Raiders handled the press spreading the ball around through a central point usually Anastasiia Boldyreva or Elina Arike in the paint area. Once the ball went into the paint, the LA Tech pressure sucked into forcing a kickout to an open MTSU shooter.
The second half was all Boldyreva, scored 13 of her 22 points in the second half.
“The biggest problem was I wasn’t finding the rim fast enough with my eyes,” Boldyreva said. “I kept working, knew they were going to fall in especially if I found the rim faster.”
Offensively the Blue Raiders are step behind from the past few years, they don’t lead the Conference USA currently and aren’t at the 70 plus points per game mark, but the defense is holding teams to an average of 54.3 points per game.
Middle Tennessee is 12th in the nation amongst the likes of UConn, Kansas St and Southern California in defense scoring according to the NCAA.
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