Wyoming Cowgirl basketball head coach Heather Ezell’s senior-laden squad suffered a loss as devastating as any in the Mountain West tournament championship game–where they’d fall to San Diego State in a grueling three overtimes, playing one of their worst games of the season and tallying a season-high 25 turnovers, a common denominator in many of their close losses this season. That loss would give the Aztecs the only NCAA tournament bid in the Mountain West, dooming the Cowgirls to yet another inferior post-season tournament–this time, the WBIT (Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament).
The Cowgirls never seemed up to play against the Texas Tech Red Raiders in the opening round of the WBIT, as the heartbreak from their devastating championship loss seemed to still loom large over the Cowgirls, despite hosting the opening round on their home court.
The Red Raiders burst out to a considerable lead at halftime off the back of a big 11-2 run to end the second quarter, as they never looked back on their way to a commanding 65-48 win, ending the Cowgirls’ season on a low note as a legendary group of six seniors disappointingly end their careers with two straight tough losses.
“We can sit here and think about our last two games and how the season ended, but what we did this year was special,” Ezell said after the loss.
The loss also marks the fourth time the Cowgirls have lost to a Power Four school this season, as the Cowgirls were unable to
The disappointment of the loss only further deepens when you take a deeper look at the matchup between these two teams. The Cowgirls were unable to take care of the Red Raiders on their homecourt, despite the Red Raiders only posting a 4-14 record in the Big 12, which included a stretch where they lost an abhorrent nine games in a row not long before the opening round of the WBIT. This came after the Cowgirls finished second in the Mountain West with a record-setting 14 wins in league play, including winning 11 of their 13 games heading into this contest.
Allyson Fertig tallied one final double-double in her final game suiting up in the Brown and Gold, scoring 17 points and grabbing 15 rebounds. Emily Mellema and Tess Barnes wrapped up their careers as well, both finishing with a team-high four assists. Joslin Igo, Ola Ustowska and McKinley Dickerson also saw their last games in Arena-Auditorium, but saw little impact on the box score in their final outing as Cowgirls.
With the Cowgirls losing the likes of those six, a new era of Cowgirls basketball is right around the corner, as Malene Pederson and Kati Ollilainen will return as the only Cowgirls next season to have played in every game this season and as the only productive players from this season, as no other possible returner from this year averaged more than two points.
