A wild afternoon of basketball wrapped up with the ACU Wildcats taking down the number one overall seed Lamar Cardinals 88-79. With the win, ACU improves to 22-9 on the season and will face Texas A&M-Corpus Christi in the title game.
Junior guard Breanna Wright was explosive on offense finishing with a career high 31 points. Wright tallied five rebounds and was perfect at the free throw line going 16-16.
Halfway through the third quarter, the Wildcats trailed by nine points, but Wright says they weren’t overwhelmed. “We just knew we were cutting the lead down and everyone was just really encouraging on the bench. We just had to keep chipping away at the lead, and that’s exactly what we did.”
Following the game, Coach Julie Goodenough said,”As a head coach, I don’t know how I could be more proud of a team that pulled off a fourth quarter like we did. We had a gutsy performance and a team that believed in their teammates and believed that they could win.”
The Cardinals led for majority of the game and their defense kept the Wildcats on their heels with a full court press throughout most of the matchup.
Senior guard Moe Kinard for the Cardinals led the team with five steals and 34 points. She shot 11-22 from the field and finished with six threes.
The Cardinals forced 19 turnovers throughout the game, but had no answer to ACU’s shooting. The Wildcats shot 62 percent from the field and 50 percent behind three. The Wildcats put up 36 points in the final quarter shooting 75 percent with Wright bringing in 19 of those points.
Another contributor for ACU was junior guard Sara Williamson. She tallied 14 points on 6-8 shooting and a team high eight assists. She emphasized,”We struggled in the first half, but made some adjustments and it really helped us out. We just wanted to come in and prove we really had the ability to beat them.”
Up next, ACU will play in their first ever conference championship Sunday at 1 p.m. against the Islanders of TXAM-CC who they defeated earlier in the season on February 27th. The Wildcats played in Moody that evening winning by a convincing 72-55 margin.
