Box Score Bridgewater, MA- The Williams College women's basketball team (14-5/3-3 NESCAC) used a great team performance to grab a 61-52 win on the road against the Bridgewater State University Bears. Williams junior Devon Caveney played all 40 minutes, scoring a game high 25 points and bringing down eight rebounds in the victory, a real bounce back performance after only recording a single point during Wednesday night's showdown with rival Amherst. No other Williams player scored in double figures while Bridgewater (8-10/5-1 Conference) was able to find a more balanced attack, possessing three players who did just that.
Six different Ephs scored a basket in the first quarter as Williams jumped out to an 18-13 lead after the first ten minutes. The Ephs and the Bears went back and forth from three point range in the early going. First, Williams junior Lauren McCall hit a three to make the score 7-2 in favor of the Ephs. After Bridgewater answered with a three from senior Stephanie DeSantis, Williams sophomore Amanni Fernandez, who leads her team in three point percentage, found the bottom of the net with her shot from long range. That was quickly answered by yet another three, this time from senior Vanesa Conceicao, who played all 40 minutes of the game and led her team with 15 points when all was said and done. After stellar offensive displays from both teams, the Ephs emerged with a five point lead at the end of the first.
Williams head coach Pat Manning got some help from her bench in the second quarter in the form of sophomore Lydia Zaleski, who used her inside presence to record six points and two rebounds in the period. The Ephs capitalized on their height advantage in the quarter, with all 15 of the Ephs' points coming off of either layups or foul shots. That same height advantage helped the Ephs out-rebound the Bears 49-29 in the game. Senior captains Katie Litman and Oge Uwanaka, both forwards for the Ephs, did their job under the boards admirably, bringing down ten and eleven rebounds respectively. Coach Manning has been preaching improved defense and rebounding for the last few weeks as keys to her team's continued success going forward as the regular season comes to a close. The Ephs excelled in both of those areas in the first half, holding Bridgewater to only 23 points and possessing a ten point lead when the teams hit the locker rooms for halftime.
In the crucial opening minutes of the second half, Williams began to pull away from the Bears behind Caveney, who scored 12 of her 25 points in the third. Caveney knocked down two three pointers on consecutive possessions to give the Ephs their largest lead of the game at 20 points. Bridgewater began to sneak back into the game after that when junior Jennie Lindland, the Bears' second leading scorer, made her first basket of the game with two minutes to play in the third quarter, adding three more before the period ended with the Bears trailing by 13.
Bridgewater outscored Williams 14-10 over the final ten minutes behind seven more points for Lindland and five from Vanesa Conceicao. However, the lead that Williams had built in the third quarter proved too much to overcome, as the Ephs just needed to find ways to preserve that lead in the waning moments of the game. Caveney nailed one more three and Zaleski completed an old fashioned three point play at the foul line to insure the closest the Bears came within their lead in the final quarter was nine points.
Coach Manning said following the game, "I am very happy with the way we played today, I thought we as a team did an excellent job rebounding the ball, Katie and Oge had some great boards. I was also happy with the way we closed today. Bridgewater didn't care when they went down by 20 they just kept coming at us, which makes this a very solid win for us today."
Williams will stay out of conference in their next game, a match-up at Westfield State on Monday.
