SEATTLE — Senior Day didn’t go well for most of the seniors on the University of Washington women’s basketball team on Sunday afternoon.
Thankfully for the Huskies, they weren’t the only ones on the floor.
Sophomore Regina Rogers and a pair of underclassmen from Snohomish County helped send the UW seniors off on a winning note with a 62-53 victory over Oregon in the final game of the regular season. The Huskies finished their regular season with three consecutive victories, matching the longest winning streak of the season.
“What a great way to close out the Pac-10 season,” said UW head coach Tia Jackson, whose team will enter this week’s conference tournament as the No. 7 seed. “We kind of started off strong at the beginning, back in January, and had a little lull there, but I’m real excited about the way we finished off. It’s tremendous momentum going into the Pac-10 tournament.”
Rogers overcame early foul trouble to score a team-high 15 points, six of which came during a tide-turning, 9-0 run midway through the second half. Mill Creek’s Kristi Kingma (11 points) and Monroe’s Sarah Morton (10) helped carry the offensive scoring load.
Reserve Christina Rozier was one of the few UW seniors who had a big night, scoring 10 points to help keep the Huskies in the game. The other three active seniors combined to go 3 of 20 from the field while scoring a total of 11 points.
Leading scorer Sami Whitcomb missed all 10 of her shots and finished with just one point, her lowest total since being held scoreless in the Huskies’ Pac-10 tournament loss to Cal last March.
“No one wants their last game to be 0-for-10,” Whitcomb said, “but I was really proud of the way everyone just stepped up. It was really fun to watch.”
The most important contributions came on defense, where UW held a high-octane Oregon offense to 28 points below the Ducks’ season average. Oregon was 19-of-63 from the field, including 3 of 21 from the 3-point line, while UW forced 18 Ducks turnovers.
“Our players did a tremendous job getting a hand up on their shooters,” Jackson said.
UW’s offense struggled for most of the game as well, but a 9-0 run in the second half opened up a 53-42 lead — the Huskies’ biggest of the game to that point — with eight minutes left. Oregon (16-14 overall, 7-11 in the Pac-10) never got the game within five points the rest of the way.
The feel-good emotions of a pre-game Senior Day ceremony took a quick turn when the game began. Whitcomb and Laura McLellan were overcome with early frustration — Whitcomb because of 0-for-7 shooting in the first half, and McLellan while arguing a foul call — but the Huskies played strong defense to stay in the game.
After UW’s four primary post players were all saddled with two quick fouls, including a pair on Rogers in the opening 37 seconds, UW scratched and clawed its way to a 29-28 lead before Oregon’s Jasmin Holliday drove past UW senior Sara Mosiman for a layup in the waning seconds.
The two teams combined for 22 turnovers while shooting 30.9 percent over the first 20 minutes. UW’s seniors were a combined 4 of 17 from the field while Whitcomb, the team’s leading scorer, had just one point.
The Ducks’ one-point halftime lead turned into a back-and-forth affair over the first 10 minutes of the second half, during which neither team led by more than four points.
Then Rogers took over, scoring three consecutive baskets within 11/2 minutes as UW opened up its first big lead of the game. Her bank shot with 8:02 left gave the Huskies a 53-42 advantage.
Taylor Lilley, who led the Ducks with 14 points, hit a 3-point shot with 1:17 remaining to get Oregon within 58-53, then got fouled by Rozier after Rozier forced a bad shot at the other end. But Lilley missed the front end of a 1-and-1, then Mosiman hit a free throw at the other end to pad UW’s lead.
Despite the early foul trouble, Rogers got a dose of revenge after playing just five scoreless minutes in an 82-71 loss to Oregon in January.
“I told myself that whatever teams I didn’t play well against in the first half of the Pac-10 (schedule), I would play well against the second half,” Rogers said. “It was frustrating (Sunday) to get two quick fouls. But at that point, my team came to me and said: You need to stop fouling, for one, and you need to keep your head in it. And I felt like I did.”
The Huskies (12-16, 7-11) finished their regular season with three consecutive wins. Only Stanford (19 straight), UCLA (7) and USC (5) — the top three teams in the Pac-10 standings — were able to close with more consecutive wins than UW.
Despite the looking departure of five seniors, the future of Husky basketball is looking brighter and brighter.
“It was really exciting to see that,” Whitcomb said. “They’re growing every year.”
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