By SPENCER BATES
HENRICO, VA — The season has officially come to a close for the St. Bonaventure women’s basketball team after it suffered a 60-50 defeat to Saint Louis in the first round of the Atlantic 10 Conference tournament.
Entering the affair, the edge Bona held over SLU was that when the sides met in the regular season, it emerged as the victors. However, just about two months had passed since that game and what the Billikens had over the Bonnies, which was arguably more valuable, was experience in the postseason, having won the WNIT Tournament last season and the A10 Championship the season before that. Which, according to Bona coach Jim Crowley, was one of his “worries” entering the game.
“I had two pretty good worries when we came in,” Crowley said. “One was that we really only had one kid who played in this tournament last year, so it was new to everybody. … And Saint Louis has had a lot of postseason success. (Kennedy) Calhoun and (Peyton) Kennedy have won a lot of games in the A10 tournament and in the postseason and it showed. It showed in the way they handled things, but I was really proud of our group. … I give a lot of credit to our kids, they kept fighting. But I really thought maybe it’s just not our day but, but those guys kept fighting.”
Bona struggled to get off the blocks in the affair, not seeing a shot fall for about the first 4.5 minutes. And while it still managed to keep the scores close through the first frame, SLU pulled away early in the second with a string of buckets against a lax Bona defense.
Part of that, Crowley chalked up to the Billikens’ experience and how it really chewed through part of their game plan.
“Credit to Saint Louis, we hadn’t seen them really execute late offense, and they really got us with that in the first half,” Crowley said. “We cleaned it up a little bit, we only gave up one or two (late buckets) in the second half, including the last 3 they hit. But we hadn’t really seen that. That was one of our goals, (to) get them into late offense. And again, I think their experience really took advantage of that, and they were really disciplined to make that happen.”
SLU went on a 15-4 run in the second frame, and Crowley noted that that was when his team could have simply folded and thrown in the towel.
But they didn’t.
Even after a long season, full of trials and tribulations, the Bonnies fought to keep themselves in the game, which pleased Crowley.
“In the second quarter, we just couldn’t really string together stops,” Crowley said. “I thought there was a number of times our kids could have (folded). It’s been a tough year, a long year, and they could have packed it in a little bit. But, they’ve really shown that (fight) all year, the last few weeks in particular. They have really bought into how we want to play, and, more importantly, how competitive and how much we want to fight. It was hard for them today with some of the things going wrong, but they kept doing it and I was really proud of that.”
Bona managed to cut the deficit some more in the third quarter, winning the frame 14-11, but the dent it made ended up not being significant enough to rattle the experienced SLU team. Specifically, Calhoun, who led all scorers in the game with 20 points. The goal, according to Crowley, was to keep Calhoun away from the interior. Unfortunately, that part of his game plan also went awry as the speed and control Calhoun operated with allowed her to slice through the paint and break down the Bona defense.
“Calhoun really got in deep, our goal was to keep her a little higher and she got really deep consistently, and either got finishes or got herself to the (free throw) line,” Crowley said. “I thought we did a pretty good job on other folks, but she is pretty good at those.”
The Bonnies had a number of big plays and confidence-boosting sequences throughout the game, but ultimately too many chances just did not fall their way as the Billikens did enough to keep a comfortable lead and get their noses across the finish line first.
“I don’t mean to simplify it, but we missed some good looks,” Crowley said. “We had some chances with some really good looks, both in the paint and from the 3-point line, we just didn’t knock enough through.”
And with the loss, the St. Bonaventure women’s basketball team officially finished its season of growth and maturation with a 6-24 overall.
