By SPENCER BATES
PHILADELPHIA, PA — The St. Bonaventure women’s basketball team is learning that old habits die hard after yet another slow start led to its third consecutive loss by 27 or more points.
For coach Jim Crowley, one of the biggest growing pains his, albeit youthful, side have experienced this season has been the way it has started games. Whether it be struggling to score, defend or a combination of the two, the early minutes have not been the most forgiving for the Bonnies.
And unfortunately for them, they struggled in the same area yet again as they fell 83-56 to Saint Joseph’s after starting the game trailing 22-2 after the first quarter.
Zoe Shaw’s floater was the only bucket Bona saw fall in the opening 10 minutes of the game. The team had eight turnovers and shot just 9.1% from the field in that time. Meanwhile, the hosts scored at will in a variety of methods through a variety of players with five different Hawks scoring at least three points in the opening frame.
But what made the pill that much harder to swallow for Crowley was the fact that through the last three quarters, his team was only out-scored by seven points.
“I mean, it’s kind of Captain Obvious, the first quarter destroyed us,” Crowley said. “You look across the last three quarters and it’s a seven-point game, we only have four turnovers, we only give up four offensive rebounds, we shoot 50%. It’s a broken record right now … we got to figure out a better way as coaches to get them ready. … We’re not very far off but we really dig a gorge. We just got to fix that.”
“We saw some good things. Obviously, this is one of the better teams in our league, one of the better teams in the country, on the cusp of an NCAA tournament bid, playing at home. (But) there was a lot of things we did that were good. We just did one really, really bad thing for 10 minutes, and that was the first quarter.”
Of the good things Crowley did see were the performances of freshmen Shaw, Hannah Robinson and Macy Smith. Shaw and Robinson both set career-high tallies in points, the former finishing with a team-high 19 points while the latter recorded 10. Smith went 3-for-4 from the field and made her lone free throw attempt on the night for seven points, two shy of her career-high which she set against Colgate this season.
However, it was the game-high 20-point display from Saint Joe’s Mackenzie Smith, the 17-point, 15-rebound night from Laura Ziegler and the 13-point contributions from both Gabby Casey and Rhian Stokes that nullified the positive individual stat lines of the Bonnies’ players.
According to Crowley, the slow starts have nothing to do with the physical side of things. Instead, it is the mentality that his players have been carrying into games that puts them on the back foot almost immediately and gives their opponents a sense of freedom as they jump ahead to early advantages.
“It’s a mentality,” Crowley said. “We certainly have some fight in us. We’ve performed in some games against some adverse situations. We’ve hung around some games where we dug big holes and have even come back in some. But there has not been many games where we’ve come right out the way, the way we’re capable of playing. I told someone, ‘I don’t even recognize our group’ in that first quarter. And I’m sure anybody who watches us thinks the same thing. So we have to fix it. … There’s just a confidence that comes with shooting the ball when you’re up 20 with 30 minutes to go. We saw that, and we’ve seen that specifically in the last three games. … It’s really easy to shoot the ball when your shot really doesn’t matter because you have a comfortable lead.”
The Bonnies will hope to make those adjustments in a quick manner as they have one more big test ahead of them before a treacherous stretch of games comes to an end. For the second game of their two-game road trip, they will square off against a Fordham side that currently sits fifth in the Atlantic 10 and that Crowley described as “tough and physical and athletic and hungry.”
That game will tip-off on Jan. 25 at 2 p.m.
