It may have been the first loss of the season for Fort Lewis College’s women’s basketball team, but the Skyhawks proved to be a formidable foe Saturday night against No. 23 Lubbock Christian.
Fort Lewis showed a great deal of heart and no shortage of talent in coming back from numerous deficits to force overtime against the defending Heartland Conference champions. Lubbock Christian was a bit better in the extra period and came out on the winning end of an 82-76 overtime thriller.
Up 69-67 with the ball and only 15 seconds left, Lubbock Christian simply had to inbound the ball and make free throws to ice the game, but the gritty group for Fort Lewis forced a late turnover, and Simone Ruedin’s late basket tied the score at 69 and sent the game to overtime.
Short-handed and possibly a bit tired from the furious second half comeback, the Skyhawks came up short in the end. Lubbock Christian jumped out to a 9-1 run in overtime. Fort Lewis came back, as it did all night, but time ran out on one more comeback.
“We battled hard ’til the end,” FLC head coach Jason Flores said in a phone interview with The Durango Herald. “It was great to see us show that kind of heart and we can take what we did (Saturday night) and build off of it. It was just a couple of mistakes that really hurt us, but we’ll regroup and try to start another winning streak.”
Mary Rambo led Fort Lewis (3-1) with a double-double of 20 points and 10 rebounds. Astrea Reed had 18 points before fouling out midway through the fourth quarter. Dallas Dickerson added 10 coming off a Skyhawks’ bench that outscored Lubbock Christian’s 22 to 7.
Tess Bruffey led the Lady Chaps (4-0) with 20 points and nine rebounds in the overtime victory.
“This was a game that was played at a very high level, and we went toe-to-toe with what I consider to be a top-5 team in the nation,” Flores said. “I was confident that we could hang with them, but it was encouraging to see that our girls weren’t intimidated one bit and played like they wanted to win.”
The Skyhawks wasted little time asserting themselves in the nationally ranked opponent’s gym. The visitors started the game with an 11-4, but the Lady Chaps weren’t about to lie down.
Lubbock Christian responded to the early FLC run with a 10-0 stretch of its own and possessed a one-point lead at the end of the opening quarter.
After the Skyhawks regained the lead early in the second quarter, LCU went on a 9-0 run to take a double-digit lead. Fort Lewis never let the score get out of hand and closed the gap to seven at halftime after Dickerson’s 3-pointer beat the buzzer and cut the deficit to 32-25.
The Lubbock Christian lead was stretched to nine in the third quarter, but the Skyhawks kept coming back and wouldn’t give in.
Rambo’s 12 second-half points and Reed’s 10 brought the Skyhawks right back into it in the fourth quarter. Five consecutive points from Kylie Santos and Dickerson tied the contest at 57, and the teams continued to exchange buckets for the rest of regulation.
jfries@durangoherald.com
