Wolves have two-game win streak snapped at home by Catawba

NEWBERRY — Newberry College women’s basketball went into Wednesday’s home contest looking to extend their two-game win streak. Unfortunately, the Wolves(5-8, 4-5 SAC) fell 71-57 to Catawba(8-5, 6-3 SAC).

The Newberry faithful piled into the stands of Eleazer Arena on Wednesday, Dec. 18th to see the women’s team face-off against the Indians. Both teams came into the game with streaks on the line. Catawba was looking to end a two game losing streak and the Wolves were looking to extend a two game win streak.

The first quarter was a back-and-forth between the two squads, but Catawba end the quarter with a 18-13 lead. The hard fought battle continued in the second quarter.

Newberry got down by as many as 10 points in the second quarter, but found a way to hang around and not let the deficit grow. They still found themselves trailing 37-30 at the half.

The Indians picked up their defensive pressure coming out of halftime and it helped extend their lead. They started to create turnovers that led to fastbreak points and easy buckets in transition. Catawba got their biggest lead of the game, 16 points, and took complete control of the game.

The Wolves wouldn’t go away easily and cranked up their own defensive pressure in the fourth quarter. After starting the final period trailing 59-43, Newberry cut the deficit down to single digits behind a three consecutive buckets from Jess Tomkins. Their comeback efforts fell short as they seem to run out of gas late in the game and missed some good looks from the three-point line.

“It’s a minor setback, but I applaud our effort to fight back. We shouldn’t have been in the hole, but I still applaud our effort to fight back. We knew Catawba was a good team that was going to pressure us. We threw the ball away 22 times,” said Wolves. head coach Johnette Walker.

Despite the loss, Tomkins had 25 points, seven rebounds and two blocks. Newberry had 22 turnovers, shot 18-of-29 from the free-throw line and made just three-of-12 of three-point attempts. Meanwhile of the defensive end of the floor, the Wolves had to deal with three Indians scoring in double figures and shooting 8-of-20 from the three-point line.

“It’s always areas of improvements. We will keep working and go back to the drawing board. Our post players do a great job of helping us break the press, but we just got to keep working at it. We always see pressure and we know other teams want to pressure us. So, we just have to keep working at it. We are going to keep repping, repping ans repping so we can get better at it as the season goes on,” Walker stated.

Newberry College will have almost two weeks off before going to Clinton, S.C. to face Presbyterian College for the first time in 18 seasons.