Williamstown, MA - The Williams College Ephs (9-3) extended current win streak to six downing the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Engineers (7-6) at home. Despite WPI stringing together multiple runs throughout the game, Williams remained firmly in charge led by the dominant games from their senior captains
Arianna Gerig and
Ellie Tounkara who had 27 and 13 points, respectively. The Ephs controlled the game, out-rebounding and out-shooting the visiting WPI for a 63-53 victory.
Williams came out of the gates hot with senior captain
Arianna Gerig setting up sophomore big
Mairi Smith for the mid-range make. Subsequently, Gerig took the ball down court herself and finished to give the Ephs an early lead. They kept this momentum going with a beautiful inside feed from
Ellie Tounkara to the cutting
Cortland McBarron for the basket, 8-2. The Engineers came back with a 9-0 run consisting of a corner three and easy fast break lay-ups capitalizing on sloppy Eph offense, 11-8. Williams soon retook the lead with
Logan Coster making a corner three along with McBarron scoring an easy lay-up off an assist from first-year point guard
Micah Walton who drained a three of her own on the next possession. After a late make from WPI, the game was tied at 18 heading into the second quarter.
The second quarter started much quieter than the first until
Skylar Chui blocked a WPI corner three and set up Walton for the fast-break lay-up. Halfway through the quarter, Williams began to build a lead with credit to Gerig and her reliable free-throw shooting and a corner three from
Kate Keenan, 37-29. The final few minutes before halftime remained scoreless.
It took a few minutes before the first points in the third quarter were tallied, but Tounkara broke the ice with a clean pull-up jumper. Gerig added to her already dominant game with an and-one to force the Engineer timeout midway through the quarter, 45-29. Out of the timeout, WPI showed some signs of life with a give-and-go finish on one play into a few more subsequent paint plays, 45-35. However, Tounkara shifted the momentum with two back-to-back wing-threes off assists from Walton. At this point, the paint defense for Williams tightened up and WPI focused on the three-point game which was not successful for them. The strength of the Eph defense really showed through here with large differences in steals and turnovers. Williams finished with 11 steals in the game while WPI had 4. With time ticking down in the quarter, Tounkara hit her third three of the quarter to push the Williams lead to 54-40 heading into the final quarter.
Gerig continued where she left off in the third quarter at the beginning of the fourth, cutting into the paint repeatedly and finishing the contested attempts including another and-one. WPI was able to string together some points near the end of the game but it was not enough to overcome the double-digit Williams lead. The final score was 63-53.
On the team's win, momentum, and upcoming NESCAC games, head coach
Pat Manning said, "Really happy with our defense. We need to finish better offensively but defense is what we wanted to be our strong suit this year. WPI had a lot of weapons and they kept fighting so I'm proud our defense was able to meet them. There are things we have to clean up and we are only halfway through so there is a lot I want to work on. NESCAC is loaded this year and we are going to have to be road warriors given our tough schedule. We played a tough schedule to gear up for NESCAC and we are ready for the weekend."
Williams has their first NESCAC conference game on Friday, January 11th at 7 pm in a rematch against Wesleyan University at home in Chandler Gym.Â
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