A 17-0 run to open the game set the tone on Thursday night, as the ULM women's basketball team dropped its Sun Belt Conference opener at Little Rock, 63-44.
The Trojans (5-7 overall, 1-0 Sun Belt) scored the first 17 points of the game and held ULM (6-6, 0-1) scoreless for the first nine-plus minutes. Lauren Fitch made two free throws with 57 seconds left in the opening quarter, and Diamond Brooks added a layup with four seconds to go in the quarter to cut Little Rock's lead to 18-4 after one quarter.
"We've been talking all week about the physicality that they're going to play with defensively, and I didn't think we responded real well to that," head coach Jeff Dow said. "There were times where I think their physicality, we allowed it to kind of take us out of what we wanted to do or what we should have been doing. All of a sudden, the cuts weren't quite as hard, the screens weren't real effective, the timing of the screens and the cuts weren't there."
ULM started to hang in with the Trojans in the second quarter, cutting the deficit to 11 after a layup by Arsula Clark and a 3-pointer from Destini Lunsford to make it 20-9. However, Little Rock scored the next eight points to push the lead out to 19, and led 34-14 at halftime.
Dow said free throw shooting was a missed key, especially in the first half.
"The first half, we only had two people that attempted a free throw in Lauren Fitch and Arsula Clark," Dow said. "We always harp on foul pressure, and one of the things that we've been really good at this year is having a fairly big disparity in the number of made free throws that we shoot compared to what the opponent even attempts. When you're not really making a concerted effort to get to the rim or making hard cuts, and then the other thing of course, is when we weren't getting any o-boards, thus we felt like we were settling for a lot of long twos."
The two sides would play nearly even in the third quarter, with Little Rock expanding the lead by one, leading 45-24 to the fourth quarter. Little Rock expanded the lead to as much as 30 at 61-31 with 4:27 to play. ULM closed the game on a 13-2 run to fall 63-44.
Fitch and Whitney Goins led the Warhawks with 10 points each. Little Rock was paced by Ronjanae DeGray, the Sun Belt Conference Preseason Player of the Year, with 23 points on 10-of-13 shooting and seven rebounds. Kyra Collier added 12 points for the Trojans.
ULM struggled from the field all night, shooting 33 percent (14-of-42), while going 4-of-13 from 3-point range (31 percent) and 12-of-20 at the free throw line (60 percent). Little Rock was red hot, shooting 52 percent (26-of-50), while hitting 1-of-3 3-pointers and 10-of-12 at the free throw line (83 percent). Little Rock out-rebounded ULM 32-25. The Warhawks had 20 turnovers and five assists, while the Trojans tallied 14 turnovers and 14 assists.
The Warhawks are back in action on Saturday at Arkansas State with tip-off at 4 p.m. Links to live video, audio and stats are available at ULMWarhawks.com.
