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Sunday, January 14, 2001
Islanders topple Texas-Pan American, 68-58
A&M-CC's Clark leads all scorers with 17 points
By Matt Young
Caller-Times
New coach, new system and new players. Everything's new for the Texas-Pan American women's basketball team, but it found the same old results at Memorial Coliseum.
Despite being much improved from last season, Texas-Pan American still didn't have enough to get past Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, as the Islanders held off the Lady Broncs 68-58 Saturday.
The 10-point loss showed a lot of improvement for Texas-Pan American, which lost twice to the Islanders by a combined 52 points last season.
"They're a much better team than last year; that was obvious," A&M-Corpus Christi coach Sheryl Estes said. "They do some really good things on the floor, but we knew we'd be in for a tougher game than the ones we had last season."
A&M-Corpus Christi (9-9) did most of its damage with center Jean Clark, who led all scorers with 17 points and a career-high 16 rebounds. Clark piled up the points despite shooting just 3-of-13 from the floor. She offset that performance by making 11 of her 15 free throws.
"We had a big size advantage inside, so I was getting the ball down low quite a bit," said the 6-foot-2 Clark. "I wasn't doing anything special, just getting the ball in the right spots. Most of my points came at the free-throw line or off offensive rebounds."
Texas-Pan American, who had no player taller than 6-0, had trouble matching Clark's size in the post.
"That's no excuse," Texas-Pan American coach Karin Nicholls said. "She's tall and athletic, but you still have to defend her and box her out, but we didn't do either."
Texas-Pan American (8-10), which won just six games last season, was led by Alexandra Gravel's 14 points.
The Lady Broncs kept it close in the first half and trailed 34-29 at halftime. However, the Islanders came out strong to open the second half, jumping out to a 12-3 run in the half's first four minutes to take a 46-32 lead with 15:50 remaining in the game.
A&M-Corpus Christi led for double digits for most of the way until Texas-Pan American made a mini-run by scoring seven straight points to cut the lead to 58-51 with 5:55 left. Islander guard ShaKayla Hawkins stopped the run with a steal and a layup and by feeding Kristin Rogers in the post for an easy bucket to put the Islanders up by double digits again. The Lady Broncs would get no closer than nine points the rest of the way.
A&M-Corpus Christi got the win despite shooting just 39 percent from the floor and committing 19 turnovers. The Islanders' big advantage came on the boards where they outrebounded Texas-Pan American 49-36.
"I thought we were pretty inconsistent throughout the game, but we did enough right to get the win," Estes said. "There are a lot of things we still need to work on, but we did an excellent job of going to the boards and boxing out. That was one of the keys to the win."
Staff writer Matt Young can be reached at 886-3702 or by e-mail at youngm@caller.com
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a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.
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