ROCK HILL, SC-- Winthrop wrapped up the first half of the Big South Conference schedule with three straight losses and will step away from league play Saturday, as it battles Longwood at the Winthrop Coliseum. Tip-off is scheduled for 7 p.m.
Winthrop has lost three straight and is now two games under .500 on the year at 9-11. Prior to the losing streak, Winthrop had won seven of nine games.
It's almost as if the Lady Eagles young squad hit a wall last weekend having scored just 62 points in two games and were 23-for-111 from the field. Tonight's game will mark a stretch in which Winthrop will play just one game in 11 days, which seems to have arrived at the right time for head coach Bud Childers and his squad. The time off should allow the team to get its legs back for the stretch run that will have the team on the road for six of its final eight games.
Over the last five games, Winthrop is just 1-4 and averaging 44.4 points per game. Freshman Dequesha McClanahn's numbers have dropped the last two games as have
Mary Hathaway's and
Kaitlyn Rubino, which all three battled through the flu last weekend.
McClanahan had her worst games back-to-back of her brief career having scored no points against Liberty and managing nine points against Coastal Carolina on 3-for-18 shooting. Rubino failed to score against Liberty as well and had just five points in the loss to Coastal.
Hathaway and
Lacey Lyons have been the deep threats for Winthrop all season, but have struggled in recent weeks from behind the arc. Hathaway has hit only one triple in her last 20 attempts and Lyons is 3-for-15 in the last five games.
Junior
TaQuoia Hammick has lifted her game over the bad spell for the Lady Eagles as she is averaging 7.8 points and 7.8 rebounds to go along with 1.8 blocks during the last five games.
Tonight's game will wrap-up the non-conference schedule for the Lady Eagles. A win tonight would give Winthrop its first winning record in non-conference since 2007-08 and just the second time ever in school history since the program moved to the NCAA Division I level. Both times will have come under coach Childers.
The 2007-08 team went 12-6 in non-conference games. The 05-06 team went 7-7 in non-league games. That is the only other season at the Division I level that the Lady Eagles didn't finish with a losing record in non-conference action.
Winthrop faces a Longwood team that is 5-15 on the year and coming off a 77-65 win at home over Cal-State Bakersfield on Wednesday.
The Lancers feature a couple of double-figure scorers in Krystal Garrison (10.7) and Brittanni Billups (10.5). Garrison, a 5-8 guard, has only played in 12 games with eight starts but shoots the ball well from the field at 48 percent and 40 percent from behind the arc (15-for-38). She is also 25-for-29 from the foul line.
Billups is a 6-1 forward and shoots 37 percent from the field and is 81 percent from the foul line (55-for-68). She also averages 6.4 rebounds (2.7 on the offensive glass).
As a team, Longwood shoots 73 percent from the foul line.
Longwood is 2-3 in its last five games and 2-2 in its last four. The Lancers are only 1-8 on the road this year, with that win coming recently at UNC Asheville on Jan. 24, 76-66. Longwood averages 61.3 points on the road and has faced the likes of Virginia (lost by 11), Monmouth, VCU (lost by 10), Cornell (lost by four), and Maryland.
SIDELINE NOTES: Winthrop will be wearing pink as part of the month of February representing "Think Pink" among all of the NCAA women's basketball programs.
The Lady Eagles are one of over 900 schools participating in the Women's Basketball Coaches' Association's "Think Pink" initiative in a global, unified effort for the WBCA nation of coaches to assist in raising breast cancer awareness on the court, across campuses, in communities and beyond. The "Think Pink" games across America. The WBCA would like to encourage its membership, all coaching staffs and game day support staffs to help unify the women's basketball world in a show of respect for all coaches in the profession who are battling cancer.
