By snoadmin
ANAHEIM – The Long Beach State women’s basketball team had its conference championship hopes end Friday afternoon at the Anaheim Convention Center. After taking out the No. 7 seed UC Irvine and the No. 3 seed Cal Poly, the 49ers faced the No. 1 UC Riverside, the regular season conference champions, and the defending Big West Conference champions. It was a battle, but in the end the defending Big West champions took the 49ers down 59-53. “I believe we played our hearts out this last game,” Karina Figueroa said. “We left it all out on the court.”
After trailing the Highlanders 34-27 at halftime, the 49ers came back, and as Ally Wade put it, they “were out for blood.” They chased UCR up until there were seven minutes left in the game, when Wade hit a three to tie the game at 49.
Wade’s free throw gave the 49ers their second lead of the game, but it was short-lived. Riverside’s Brittany Waddell and Kemie Nkele were able to shoot over LBSU’s zone, as the Highlandrs made 9-for-22 of their 3-pointers.
“I don’t think it failed us, because when we pressured the ball they had a lot of trouble,” Long Beach State head coach Mary Hegarty said. “To their credit, they moved the ball extremely well.”
This was the first game of the tournament that the 49ers didn’t take an immediate and large lead. Figueroa had nine points and Wade had seven points at the end of the first half, but Kaiti O’Brien and Courtney Jacob, who had previously been two of the team’s biggest producers in the Big West Tournament, were only able to get five points and three points in the first half.
Figueroa finished with a game-high 20 points, while Wade finished with 14. O’Brien finished with 11 and Jacob with five. “To be honest, until that buzzer went off at the end, I really didn’t have any doubt that we weren’t going to win,” Hegarty said. “I believed we could do it. Our team believed we could do it, and until the very end, any thoughts other than winning never crept into my mind.”
After two big wins in the first two rounds, the team was extremely confident coming in, and felt no threat from the conference’s best team. Not only did Hegarty feel the team was going to win, but the rest of the team di as well.
“We were rollin’ with it, we were coming for tomorrow,” Wade said. “We had no doubt in our mind that we were going to win this game, but we didn’t.”
