North Texas Daily

Women’s basketball suffered its fourth loss in five games Saturday afternoon as the Mean Green fell 72-60 to Louisiana Tech University at home.

The Mean Green (8-9, 2-5 Conference USA) defense gave up double-digit points to four different Louisiana Tech (11-8, 3-5 C-USA) players. Freshman guard Robyn Lee scored 12 points off the bench for the Lady Techsters.

“I do think they got better bench production than we did tonight,” Head coach Jalie Mitchell said. “I thought that was big and key [for them].”

Much like the game on Thursday, North Texas fell behind early in the first quarter but rallied back to cut the deficit to three points at the end of the first quarter. The second quarter was a back-and-forth affair with North Texas on top 34-33 after Louisiana Tech’s Salma Bates beat the buzzer with a 3-pointer to end the second quarter.

At the half, Noble had 15 points and was 2 of 3 from the 3 point line, but the rest of the team was 0-5 from 3 point range. Bates and Lee had 9 points for Louisiana Tech at the half, while star junior guard Keiunna Walker was held to three points.

“Keiunna Walker, we were trying to get them out of the way,” Noble said. “I think 10 [Bates] showed up well for them tonight and we shouldn’t have let her get a lot of the things she did. You know, we kind of underestimated her and she kind of came out to hoop.”

The third quarter was tight throughout and neither team was able to pull ahead going into the fourth. The game started to slip away from the Mean Green, and Walker began to take over the game for Louisiana Tech, scoring 11 of her 19 points in the fourth quarter.

During the fourth quarter, the Mean Green did not score a field goal for three minutes of game time, while Louisiana Tech and Walker pulled away.

“I don’t think the [scoring] drought was us necessarily taking poor shots,” Mitchell said. “I thought we needed to finish better; we could’ve gotten to the line. I thought some shots we made too difficult, [and] there were a lot of possessions in the first half where I thought we hit the ‘one more’ pass and I don’t know if we did that as well in the second half.”

Noble, who put up 22 points on 10 of 18 shooting, was the only player in double-digits for the Mean Green but Mitchell does not think scoring was the team’s biggest problem.

“Our defense didn’t show up for us tonight,” Mitchell said.

North Texas travels west to take on in-state rival, University of Texas-El Paso next Thursday.

Featured image: Redshirt senior forward Madison Townley looks to create space on offense against UTSA defenders on Jan. 9, 2021. Image by Zachary Thomas.