For the 26th time in team history, the Hope College women's basketball team broke the century mark in scoring, cruising past the Kalamazoo College Hornets with a 111-30 win on the road on Saturday.
The No.1-ranked Flying Dutch also established a team record for margin of victory with 81 points more than the Hornets.
The win is Hope's 35th in-a-row and gives them a 6-0 record. This was Kalamazoo's first game of the season.
The last time Hope scored more than 100 was also against Kalamazoo during the 2019-20 season, a 104-39 win at DeVos Fieldhouse. The Flying Dutch have never lost a game when reaching the 100-point mark.
"We've watched it all season long," head coach Brian Morehouse said. "The teams that have played the fewer games, and are just starting to play with all the COVID protocols, it's just tough. For Kalamazoo, it's their first game, and they weren't even on campus all fall semester. It's a really big challenge, and I recognize that. Coach Katie Miller is first class, and she had her kids playing incredibly hard. I told her after the game, 'You're going to get better when you get your feet underneath you just like the rest of us who have a few games under our belt.'"
The Flying Dutch trademarks – up-tempo offense and tenacious defense — were combined to near perfection and in equal measure from the tip.
Offensively, Hope had a 21-point lead after the first 10 minutes, 30-9, and a 38-point lead at halftime, 57-19. In the third quarter, the Flying Dutch held the Hornets to only three points and lengthened their lead to 88-22.
Defensively, they forced the Hornets into 36 turnovers, and grabbed twice as many rebounds as Kalamazoo, 50-25.
Every Hope player contributed to the win with 16 of 18 Flying Dutch scoring. In fact, 74 of their 111 total were bench points.
"Credit needs to go to Coach (Courtney) Kust for rotating 18 people into the game in (the fourth) quarter," said Morehouse. "That is Hope College record, too, to play 18 players in one quarter.
"Getting a lot of people on the floor today was really important to us. You know, this was a hard week (with the cancellation the NCAA Division III tournament). I give great credit to our players for making the decision to not just continue playing without a national tournament, but to continue playing at a very high level and for each other. I really feel like when you look at our bench right now, when you look at how people play on the floor right now, there's no selfishness. They're playing for each other."
Hope shot well from the floor – 56.3% – converting often on the open shots they had. "I thought that was a big key," Morehouse said. "A lot of times we've missed layups lately, and I thought we scored at a much more efficient rate around the rim today."
Five Hope players scored in double figures: Sophomore Claire Baguley of Ada (Forest Hills Central HS), pictured right, led 13 points; senior Olivia Voskuil of Holland (Holland Christian HS), pictured left, scored 12 points; and senior Sydney Muller of Grand Rapids (Grand Rapids Christian HS), senior Mallory Gerber of Schaumburg, Ill. (Schaumburg HS), and sophomore Meg Morehouse of Zeeland (Zeeland East HS), each with 10.