WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.—Unable to overcome a nightmarishly poor offensive first half, the Williams women's basketball team (14-4, 2-2 NESCAC) fell 65-51 to Amherst in a game that did not count towards the NESCAC standings. The Jeffs (16-1, 3-1 NESCAC) swept the regular season home-and-home between the two teams for the first time in three years; Williams has not accomplished the equivalent feat since 2007.
Jaimie Renner led all scorers with 19 points and four assists, making her one of four Jeffs with at least 10 points. Oge Uwanaka led the Ephs with 13 points and also pulled down seven rebounds in just 16 minutes, for one of her strongest performances of the season."Oge played her heart out," said Williams coach Pat Manning.
There was no single backbreaking moment, no dagger shot, and the Ephs remained within shouting distance for much of the second half. But Amherst's impressive free throw shooting in a foul-filled half—they were 19-23 from the line in the period, with two of those misses coming late with the outcome already sealed—kept their lead a reasonable size, then made it all but insurmountable when Cheyenne Pritchard sank a pair to make the score 56-43 with 3:15 remaining. "A lot of whistles in this game," said Manning on the proliferation of fouls. "It was hard to have a lot of [offensive] flow."
The Ephs did their job in the first half, limiting Amherst—which came out of last weekend as the 8th-best shooting team in the country, at 45.6%--to just nine field goals. In the paint, Williams was ferocious, limiting the Jeffs to a stream of low-percentage drives and long threes. Only near the end of the half did Williams' resistance show signs of weakening. After Megan Robertson made a shot in the paint, her first, Renner slipped in to steal Kellie Macdonald's inbounds pass. All at once, the Jeffs led 21-12, and an incensed Manning called timeout. Then Meredith Doswell drained a three from the top of the key, buoying Amherst into halftime with a 12-point lead.
The stats at the break were nothing short of bizarre: the two teams combined to shoot 13-56 (23.2%) from the field, and pulled down a combined eight offensive boards (five for Amherst, three for Williams). During one stretch, the Ephs went over eight minutes without a field goal, yet trailed by only five when Devon Caveney broke that string with a layup with 4:14 left. . That first half was odd," said Manning. "We just never got in a flow offensively. We didn't have poise offensively...We missed a lot of [shots] you can't miss."
After Renner opened the scoring in the second half by getting a favorable roll on a layup, giving Amherst a 28-14 lead, the Ephs rallied. Caveney erupted for seven consecutive points, a run that included the Ephs' only three-pointer of the night. Then, Uwanaka looked off a defender with a head fake and powered to the basket for a layup, and Caveney made a pair of free throws to cap the 11-0 run. The score was 28-25; the Ephs had life.
They got no closer. Meredith Doswell made another three to squelch the run, and the Jeffs slowly began to establish a steady paint presence. After Katie Litman shut down Megan Robertson for most of the first half ("We liked that matchup," said Manning), the Jeffs' forward began to make her presence felt in the second half, alternating drives and mid-range jumpers to score 10 of her 14 points overall in the half. Then the fouls started and the score stabilized, and the Jeffs maintained their lead all the way to the finish.
Both teams resume their NESCAC campaigns this Saturday. The Jeffs will visit Trinity, while the Ephs will host Hamilton. Both games tip off at 3pm.