UCO Women’s Basketball Team Drops Pair of Games During Frigid Road Trip

The University of Central Oklahoma women’s basketball team lost at Nebraska-Kearney Thursday before falling short to No. 5-ranked Fort Hays State in Kansas on Saturday afternoon.

UCO is now 7-12 overall and 2-8 in Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletics (MIAA) conference play, losing four games in a row.

The first game of the road trip tipped off Thursday evening in Kearney, Nebraska, where the Bronchos were eventually defeated 65-57.

UCO held a five-point lead midway through the second quarter, but a 10-0 Nebraska-Kearny run put the Bronchos down 33-28 at the half. 

The second half was a back-and-forth battle, where UCO eventually clawed back to capture a one-point lead with six minutes left; however, they could not separate and fell behind 57-58 with 2:40 left to play.

UNK went on another end-of-half run and outscored UCO 7-0 down the final stretch to clinch the conference win.

UCO struggled shooting, finishing with a 33.3 field goal percentage and a suboptimal 17% from three-point range. 

First-year guard Kaitlyn McCarn led the Bronchos in scoring, tallying 15 points on 6-18 shooting and bringing down nine rebounds for a near double-double.

Despite her effort on the boards, McCarn said she thinks late-game rebounding was the reason for the eventual defeat.

“We let them get offensive rebounds, which is one of the little things we have preached on and are trying to work on as a team and be able to do to finish games,” McCarn said.

The Bronchos then traversed across a snowy Midwest landscape before arriving in Hays, Kansas, for a matchup with the fifth-best team in the country according to the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association’s weekly rankings.

UCO fell behind early, trailing 22-10 at the end of the first quarter after shooting 5-18 in total and 0-5 from three.

FHSU took advantage, continuing to blitz the Bronchos in the second quarter, shooting a blistering 83.3 percent from the field and a perfect 3-3 from behind the arc to take a 20-point lead going into the break.

The Tigers would never look back, and despite a strong fourth quarter surge from the Bronchos, it proved to be a formality as FHSU filed the game into the win column with a final score of 78-65. 

Zero UCO starters scored in double digits, but a valiant bench effort resulted in 49 points from the players off the pine. Freshman guard NyKaiya Dillard led the group with 16, and Olivia Quapaw added 14.

Central finished the game with an improved 38.8 shooting percentage; however, that number was inflated by the fourth quarter numbers. The Bronchos shot 58 percent when the game was already out of reach. Through the first three quarters, they shot a mere 31.25 percent.

McCarn once again led the starters in scoring with eight, but her performance was emblematic of the team’s as she finished 3-15 from the field.

McCarn said the Bronchos got off to a slow start against a talented team, which made it difficult for the team to make a difference the rest of the way.

“In the second half, we came out with more energy and focus, which led to closing the gap a little bit, but against great teams, it’s hard to make that big of a comeback,” she said. 

McCarn said that, despite the losses, she thinks the team has gained valuable insight that she hopes to translate into results as they turn the page to the back half of the conference schedule.

“We’ve lost a lot of close ones due to the little things we can fix. For the rest of the season, we are going to clean up those mistakes and pull out some big wins,” she said.

UCO returns home for a pair of conference games this week, with a matchup versus Newman University on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. and a matinee against Emporia State University on Saturday, with tipoff at 1:30 p.m.