SEATTLE — The good news for the University of Washington women’s basketball team on Saturday afternoon was the second half, when the Huskies outscored Oregon State 41-32.
The bad news? Washington still got thumped.
The Huskies started the game slowly and then got worse, and by halftime the visiting Beavers had a shocking 37-14 lead. Washington was better in the second half, but those first 20 minutes — dreadful seems like a good word — were just too much to overcome in a 69-55 loss at Bank of America Arena.
The defeat was the fourth in a row for the Huskies, and all have been by lopsided scores. Washington was beaten last week at Stanford 112-35, 62-34 at California, and 75-55 at home Thursday against Oregon.
Saturday’s setback leaves the Huskies with a 5-10 season record and a 1-4 Pacific-10 Conference mark. Oregon State, which was a half-game behind Washington in the league standings before the game, improved to 11-5 and 2-4.
UW coach Tia Jackson went out of her way not to criticize her team after the game, going so far as to open her postgame media remarks by saying, “I think we’ve got a lot of positives to build on here.”
She was referring to the second half, when the Huskies “finally turned (their aggressiveness) up. And scoring 41 points in the second half, that’s obviously something we were waiting for. We knew we had scorers out there and we were finally able to find that.
“The team never gave up,” she added. “That you can stomach. We stayed together as a team and continued to work.”
True, perhaps, but the Huskies were still listless and sloppy from the opening tip and never had a realistic chance to win. They trailed 10-6 after 5½ minutes, and then watched Oregon State go on an 18-2 scoring burst.
The only UW player with any spark at the outset was guard Christina Rozier, who had all of the team’s first eight points. The only Huskies to score by halftime were Rozier (10) and forward Sami Whitcomb (four). And by then Washington had more turnovers (16) than points.
Sluggish starts have been a season trend for Washington, and “I have no idea (why),” Jackson confessed. “If I remember, in my second timeout of the second half I said, ‘OK, when are we going to wake up here? There’s a game going on and I’d like for us to show up.’ And finally it started.”
Oregon State’s lead was still 20 with two minutes to play, but the Huskies managed a late flurry to get within 14 points at the end.
The second half “was a completely different game,” Jackson said. “(The Huskies) just started playing basketball.”
“If we had another 10 minutes, we definitely could’ve won that game,” said UW center Laura McClellan. “We were more way more aggressive (in the second half) attacking the basket and getting better looks. … We can and should’ve beat this team by the way we played in the second half, and it’s really frustrating not to be able to pull that off.
UW guard Kristi Kingma, who missed three games with a high ankle sprain suffered in a Jan. 3 game against Washington State, returned to play seven minutes Saturday, all in the first half. She missed two shots from the field and did not score.
Though team trainers gave Kingma an OK to play, “from my standpoint as a coach, I’m looking at it and going, ‘I know my Kristi. And that’s not her,’” Jackson said of Kingma’s brief stint. “And I don’t ever want to put her in a situation where in her mind she’s saying, ‘I’m still the same player,’ but her limbs are not allowing her to do the same things.”
Kingma is “roughly 70 or 75 (percent),” Jackson said.
Brittany Eskridge, a teammate of Kingma’s at Mill Creek’s Jackson High School and a backup center for Oregon State, did not play.
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