Women's action: Lady Colonials dominating on three game win streak

by Aaron Hartman, contributor

If you haven’t been paying attention to the women’s basketball team, I suggest you start now. The RMU women’s team is currently in first place in the NEC with an 11-2 record and holds a two game lead of second place Mount St. Mary’s.

The ladies started a three game win streak by winning a double overtime thriller against St. Francis Brooklyn 101-95. They continued the streak by dominating a dangerous Sacred Heart team 90-66. The streak continued after a solid 66-49 victory over Central Connecticut State.

The most impressive of these three victories was the huge win over Sacred Heart. The Pioneers were the biggest threat to RMU at the time. Had RMU lost, they would have given up the top spot in the conference for only the second time this season. The ladies played the best game I have seen them ever play in route to a huge win over a serious threat.

In my recap of the Wagner game, I claimed that Coach Sal was out-coached for the first time this year. You can forget all of that, because he drew up an extremely effective game plan against Sacred Heart. He chose to face guard Sacred Heart’s star player, Gabriell Washington. Basically, whoever was guarding Washington had to face her and make it impossible for her to receive an easy pass all game.

By taking Washington basically out of the game, the Colonials made the decision to play five on five when they were on offense and play four on four when they were on defense. She was visually frustrated with the way she was being defended and her frustration caused her to quickly accumulate fouls when she was in the game. She ended the game with no points and four fouls after playing only 19 minutes.

The players have showed that they are capable of performing in tough circumstances as well. They proved this at the end of the first overtime in the St. Francis Brooklyn game. With four seconds remaining and the game tied 82-82, Rebeca Navarro fouled Eilidh Simpson shooting. My girlfriend turned to me as Simpson shot her second shot and said “I hope you know you guys just lost this game.” Janee Brown proved her wrong by taking the ball the length of the court in four seconds and scoring her first points of the game and forcing double overtime.

In earlier articles I also made the claim that we should not rely on Artemis Spanou to score so many points every game. I made need to retract that claim as well. Artemis is absolutely deadly from the blocks, the left block in particular. She has a killer spin move from the blocks that she scores many of her points off of. So, if she is open down on the blocks, why not let her score a ton of points? Artemis with the ball on the block will definitely yield the highest expected value of points, so it’s smart coaching to get her the ball there as often as possible.

Coach Sal has been starting a different line up than earlier in the season. He used to start Brown-Stamolamprou-Ravelli-Spanou-Olingende, but now his starting five has been changed to Jackson-Stamolamprou-Ravelli-Spanou-Oursler. Cassie Oursler has regained her starting spot from earlier this season. She looks to have corrected her fouling problem and looks stronger on the boards than she did earlier this season. Even though the starting five has changed, Coach Sal is still using a lot of his bench, giving an average of eight players double digit minutes in the last three games.

As aforementioned, the women’s team holds a two game lead over second place Mount St. Mary’s with five games left to play this season. The ladies will meet the Mount for the final game of the season, and the only way the Mount can take the regular season conference championship is if they win two more games than RMU in the four games before they meet in the final game which they must win as well.

After running some calculations using win percentages, the colonials look to have about a 99.5% chance at winning the regular season conference championship. The most plausible way that RMU could give up the title is if they lose three out of the next five, with one of those being to the Mount, and the Mount going undefeated. That has about a 0.0041 probability of happening, so the Colonials are in very good shape.

Come out and support the ladies on Monday February, 17 at 7 pm as they take on LIU Brooklyn. There will be a drawing for free hoodies! Attendance has been pretty good for the women’s games, so keep it up!