WBB: Improvements made in 72-35 victory over San Diego State

They say that the Aztec empire perished due to the Spanish conquistadors.

But on Tuesday night, the Aztecs faltered not because of European invaders, but because of poor shooting and being nearly doubled-up by the Aggies on the boards.

Led by Karla Gilbert’s second double-double of the season and 10 assists from Jordan Jones, the No. 20 Texas A&M women’s basketball team defeated the visiting San Diego State Aztecs 72-35 in front of 4,023 fans at Reed Arena. With the victory, A&M moves to 5-2 on the season while the Aztecs fall to 1-5.

Ahjalee Harvey had seven points and five steals for the Aztecs in a losing effort.

“Our team was ready to play tonight,” said A&M head coach Gary Blair. “We played a lot of different match-up zones and (Bob) Starkey did a good job of changing things up. We had no attention of playing the zone that much, but they weren’t shooting well from the outside and we just stayed in it.”

From the opening tip, A&M blitzed San Diego State by scoring the first 11 points of the game. In fact, it wasn’t until a three-pointer by Chairese Culberson with 14 minutes left in the first half that the Aztecs registered their first bucket.

Holding the visitors to just 21% (5-of-24) from the field in the opening period allowed the Aggies to take a 31-14 lead to the locker room even though they were shooting just 39% (10-of-26) themselves.

“[Getting out to an early lead] helped us stay focused,” said Gilbert. “We were able to keep working on the things we were doing. We stayed in on defense and got to work on some things.”

The second half was more of the same as A&M continued to hold the Aztecs to sub-par shooting which allowed them to continuously grow their lead to as many as 38 points.
In total, four Aggies scored in double figures and 10 players had at least two points in the victory.

And while seeing multiple players put up big numbers is great, the fact that the team was able to bounce back from a less than stellar performance at the Paradise Jam tournament in the Virgin Islands was the greatest accomplishment of the night.

“I felt like we didn’t have as much chemistry [in the tournament],” said sophomore Courtney Williams. “We had a team meeting after practice yesterday and got everything straight. We don’t want this season to be a down season so we have to have trust in each other and believe that our teammates have our back.”

That players only meeting may prove to be a turning point with this group that according to Blair is a work in progress.

“We want to play Aggie basketball,” said Blair. “We don’t want to be the team that doesn’t make the ninth straight trip to the NCAAs or isn’t playing in our own regional. To [avoid] that, we have a lot of basketball to improve on because the SEC is better this year than it was last year.”

Their next opportunity  to improve comes on Saturday at 7 PM as the Washington Huskies make the long trip to College Station. After that, the team makes the trip to State College to take on the No. 10 Penn State Lady Lions in what most consider to be A&M’s toughest non-conference test.

“Washington is coming in here with a great freshman point guard, but they only have eight healthy players right now,” stated Blair. “It’s going to be a good test for us because then we don’t play until we go to Penn State.

“How good are we? I still don’t know.”