BATON ROUGE, La. (11/30/04) Facing the top ranked team in the nation for the first time in school history the North Texas women’s basketball team fell to the LSU Tigers 77-51 at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center. The Tigers improved to 8-0 on the season while North Texas drops to 2-2 on the year.
“I felt like we got better as the game went on and we didn’t back down from the runs they made on us,” said North Texas head coach Tina Slinker. “I felt like tonight was the first game that we really played for 40 minutes and I was really proud of our effort”.
Freshman Talicia Sanders scored in double figures for the first time of her career with a team-high 12 points for North Texas. LSU was led by All-American Seimone Augustus who scored a game-high 22 points as she had a perfect night shooting from the floor at 11-11.
LSU opened the game on with a 16-2 run in the first five minutes but the Mean Green were able to respond with a 8-0 run of their own to cut the Tiger lead to 16-10 with 13:11 in the first half.
North Texas kept the game close throughout the first half never trailing by more than 15 points until LSU ended the half with a 6-0 run in the final minute to take at 41-25 lead into the break.
The Mean Green were able to trim the Tigers lead down to 45-32 with 14:21 remaining until LSU went on a 13-3 run capped off by an Augustus basket to make it 58-35 with 8:53 left.
“We knew that they are a team that can get hot and make a lot of runs to hurt teams but I was really proud of the way our team was able to continue to battle and fight back after every run they made”, Slinker said.
North Texas shot 37 percent from the floor while LSU shot 50 percent. The Mean Green committed 29 turnovers which LSU converted into 28 points
North Texas closes out its four-game road trip on Sunday, December 5 with a battle against SMU at 2 p.m.
