BATON ROUGE — LSU’s 13th-ranked women’s basketball team has only lost one game in December over the last five years and the Lady Tigers will look to continue that dominance on Sunday as the Lady Tigers play host to Mercer at 2 p.m. at the Maravich Assembly Center.
The contest will be broadcast by the LSU Sports Network and can be heard in the Baton Rouge area on 107.3 FM. The game can also be heard on the internet at www.LSUSports.net. The game will also be televised on a tape-delayed basis by College Sports-Southeast. The game will be aired at 10:30 p.m. on Monday .
The Lady Tigers enter the contest with a 7-1 as LSU has won seven straight games since a season-opening loss to Texas Tech. Since the 1995-96 season, the Lady Tigers have posted a 24-1 record in games in December. Mercer, who played at McNeese State on Saturday night, is 6-3.
In addition to its December dominance, the Lady Tigers have also put together a couple of impressive home-court winning streaks. LSU has won 13 straight games overall at the PMAC, and the Lady Tigers have also won a school-record 40 consecutive non-conference home games, a streak that dates back to January in 1995.
“This is another opportunity for us to get better as a team,” LSU coach Sue Gunter said. “With what we’re facing in the next month we must get better. The thing that I want this team to do is change their attitude in regard to putting teams away. You can really establish yourself if you walk out on the floor and you execute and put a team away.
“We were up on SMU 26-9 and that’s when we should have gone ahead and opened it up, but we didn’t. We let them hang around and if we don’t start putting teams away it will come back to haunt us.”
LSU’s ability to put away teams must start with 5-foot-11 senior forward Katrina Hibbert and 5-9 junior guard Marie Ferdinand. Hibbert, who averages 14.8 points a contest, leads the Southeastern Conference with 8.7 assists a contest and ranks second in the league with 4.1 steals a game. Ferdinand ranks third in the SEC with 18.2 points a game and she leads the league with 4.3 steals a contest.
Ferdinand and Hibbert give the Lady Tigers one of the nation’s best 1-2 punches as far as scoring, assists and steals are concerned. Hibbert and Ferdinand give LSU the only player in nation to be ranked in the top 20 in both steals and assists.
Joining Hibbert and Ferdinand in the Lady Tiger lineup will be 5-11 junior point guard Angelia Crockett, 5-11 junior forward April Brown and 5-11 sophomore center DeTrina White. Crockett is coming off a career-best seven-assist performance against SMU, while White had perhaps her best game of the year with 17 points and 10 rebounds against the Mustangs.
“That game was more much more DeTrina White-like with her points and rebounds,” Gunter said. “I thought Angelia had another good game. She’s not a scorer, but she does so many things to help this team, things that never show up in the boxscore. She’s such a very smart player.”
Against Mercer, the Lady Tigers will face a team that averages only 61.2 points a contest. LSU enters the game ranked first in the SEC and third in the nation allowing just 53.1 points a game.
One of Mercer’s three losses this year is an 82-41 defeat to Auburn. Last year, LSU posted a 71-42 win over the Bears in Baton Rouge.
Mercer’s top scorer is 5-4 senior guard Jenny Sessor, who averages 10.9 points a game. The Bears are coached by Billy Holmes, a former assistant coach at both New Orleans and McNeese State.
“Billy Holmes has been a friend of ours for a very long time and he does a great job,” Gunter said. “He will have his team ready to play and they will be competitive. They’ve played some good teams so we’ll have to be ready to play.”
LSU wraps up its pre-Christmas schedule on Wednesday at 7 p.m. as the Lady Tigers play host to Wake Forest at the Maravich Assembly Center. Cornelia Gayden, a former Lady Tiger all-American and the NCAA record holder for 3-pointers in a game, will be honored before the contest.