ROCK HILL, SC-- The Winthrop women's basketball team stays on the road as it heads to Clinton, SC for a 5 p.m. match-up with Presbyterian College Saturday evening.
    It is a key matchup for the Lady Eagles if they would like to have a shot at finishing in the top four of the conference standings. Winthrop is two games behind High Point, which is in fourth and three games back of Gardner-Webb and Radford with six games remaining.
    If the Lady Eagles wish to finish in the top four, they will have to start tonight in Clinton against a Presbyterian College team that has defeated them in the last two meetings.
    Winthrop is coming off a tough loss on the road at Liberty, but finished the weekend trip at 1-1 with a win at Coastal Carolina on Saturday.
    Winthrop and Presbyterian College are both coming off big losses on Monday, but have also won two of their last three games. The Blue Hose have won three of the last five games.
    Over the last few weeks, Winthrop's guards have really struggled shooting the ball. For the first half of the season, Winthrop's guards carried a big load of the offense, but in recent weeks the post players have picked up their scoring and the guards have fallen off.
    The last five games Winthrop has averaged 43.6 points and are 2-3 and the leading scorer is junior center TaQuoia Hammick at 7.8 points per game. She's shooting 50 percent from the floor and averaging 7.6 rebounds.
    Kaitlyn Rubino is averaging just 4.4 points on 40 percent shooting and Katie Fitzgerald is averaging 4.6 points on 50 percent shooting.
    Winthrop's main four guards in Dequesha McClanahan, Lacey Lyons, Mary Hathaway and Tiffany Charles have had a tough time getting shots to fall since its league-opening win over Charleston Southern. Since then the guards are a combined 88-for-307 from the field (29 percent) and 23-for-109 from behind the arc (21 percent).
    Defensively not much has changed as the team is allowing 56.7 points over that time frame.
    The Blue Hose are led by sophomore center Mariah Pietrowski, who is averaging 10.8 points and 6.4 rebounds while shooting 54 percent from the floor.
    Dria David is second on the team in scoring at 6.5 points and one of four players averaging five points or more. David is tops on the team in assists with 60 and steals with 42. She also has a team-best 94 free throw attempts (70 percent from the line).
    One of the top scorers in two of the last three games has been Karlee Taylor. In the wins at Savannah State and UNC Asheville Taylor averaged 18 points per game, including a 21-point performance against the Bulldogs.
    Presbyterian College the second best scoring defense in the conference at 55.7 while the Lady Eagles are third best at 56.3. Winthrop is tops in the Big South in field goal percentage defense at .353 while the Blue Hose are fourth at .377. Despite being one of the top teams defending the three-point line in the conference, Winthrop couldn't stop the Blue Hose from behind the arc in the first meeting as they finished 9-for-18. They were 6-for-7 in the second half alone. PC is the second best three-point shooting team in the league at 30 percent. On top of that, PC has the leagues lowest scoring offense at 49.6.
   
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