The University of Wyoming’s women’s basketball team headed to Malibu, Calif., during Thanksgiving break for the Pepperdine Thanksgiving Tournament and battled for the win against the Seton Hall Pirates in its first game.
The Cowgirls beat the Pirates 55-45 on Friday afternoon, but the second half was the crunch time for the team. UW started out slow and struggled for a while, and the team did not score until Chaundra Sewell’s three-point basket at 17:12 in the first half. The Cowgirls were down 6-0 before that play.
The Cowgirls also struggled with possessions in the first half. They turned the ball over to the Pirates for their first six possessions.
At half time, the score was 27-20 and the Cowgirls knew they needed to work harder to get the win they sought.
“It really made a difference in the second half when we went to the zone,” said head coach Joe Legerski said in the UW athletics news release. “We talked about it all week that their quickness was going to be a problem for us and it was. We knew that we had the zone to fall back on and we started to slow it down at the end of the first half and then we had to stay committed to it.”
In the second half, the Cowgirls came back to go on a scoring streak and notch a win.
Some of the key players that helped make the win possible for the Cowgirls were Chelan Landry and Kayla Woodward. Landry scored 13 points, a career high, and five rebounds in the 21 minutes she was off the bench. Woodward had her first double-double of the season with 12 points and 10 rebounds. Sewell also had 11 points and eight rebounds.
“Seton Hall can put a great deal of pressure on you,” Legerski said in the release. “We made some lazy passes, they took advantage of it and that’s what good teams do. As the game went on we got a little more aggressive and people stepped up, started making some free throws. A big factor was also not putting them on the free throw line. We only had six fouls in the second half.”
The Cowgirls went on to face the Pepperdine on Saturday, and UW left the game with a 72-50 win over the Waves. The Cowgirls are now 4-0 in preconference play. UW will face off next against the Colorado Buffaloes, also 4-0, at 7 p.m. tonight in Boulder, Colo.
