BATON ROUGE — Marie Ferdinand scored 24 points, including 16 in the second half, as the seventh-ranked LSU women’s basketball team overcame a nine-point first half deficit to post a 68-51 win over Arkansas here Saturday.
With the win, LSU improved to 19-4 overall and 8-2 in Southeastern Conference action. Arkansas lost its second straight game and fell to 14-9 overall and 4-6 in league play. The win was LSU’s fourth straight over the Lady’Backs in Baton Rouge. Earlier this year, LSU beat Arkansas, 82-69, in Fayetteville.
The game was played before 6,352 fans which marked the third largest crowd in LSU women’s basketball history.
Katrina Hibbert added 18 points for the Lady Tigers, while DeTrina White chipped with 12 points. Karyn Karlin led the Lady?Backs with 25 points.
“I think it really boils down to the second half,” LSU coach Sue Gunter said. “We did a nice job of fighting back and getting a little bit of a lead going in at halftime. At halftime, there were really not a lot of adjustments made except for our attitude.
“You had two tired teams on the floor. Both teams are coming off road losses and it was the will to win that you had to have. I thought the crowd made a difference. The energy we had in the second half was the difference.”
LSU fell behind by as many as nine points in the first half as Arkansas extended its lead to 27-19 on a pair of free throws by Karlin at the 3:36 mark. LSU answered with a 3-pointer by Hibbert that ignited an 11-0 run by the Lady Tigers over the next three minutes. A basket by White tied the score at 27-27 at the 1:27 mark and then White scored again to give LSU a 29-27 advantage with 49 seconds left in the half.
LSU led 31-29 at halftime on a bucket by Ferdinand as time expired.
“Going into halftime, I wasn’t happy with the way I was playing,” Ferdinand said. “I wasn’t doing much for my team. Coming out in the second half, I just wanted to get into the flow of the game.”
And she did as Ferdinand scored 13 of LSU’s first 21 points in the second half as the Lady Tigers, except for a brief tie at 33-33, led for the entire final stanza. Ferdinand’s 3-pointer as the shot clock expired at the 12:47 mark gave the Lady Tigers at 47-41 lead. A pair of free throws by Karlin got the Lady’Backs to within 47-43, at the 11:53 mark, but that was as close as Arkansas would get as LSU ran off 16 unanswered points over the next six minutes. White’s free throw capped the run, giving the Lady Tigers a 63-43 advantage with 6:00 to play.
“Marie woke up at halftime,” Gunter said. “This is just a good win for us. It’s our eighth SEC win which was one of our goals coming into the season was to get at least eight conference wins.”
For the game, LSU, the nation’s second-leading field goal percentage team connected on 26-of-51 shots from the floor for 51 percent. Arkansas managed to shoot just 33 percent for the game, including on 23 percent in the second half.
LSU returns to action on Thursday when they play host to Vanderbilt at 7 p.m. at the Maravich Assembly Center.