BATON ROUGE, La. – The LSU women’s basketball team dominated the Mississippi College Lady Choctaws Friday night, outscoring them 77-44.
Friday night’s game was a preseason exhibition leading into their season opener against New Orleans on Tuesday, November 5 at 6:30 p.m. in the PMAC.
The Lady Tigers led 41-18 at the half, shooting 16-34 from the floor and grabbing 29 rebounds. They built on this lead, finishing at 32-69 from the floor and 53 rebounds.
It was a balanced attack from the Lady Tigers as the entire roster scored and four players scored in double digits. Awa Trasi, Tiara Young, and Khayla Pointer each scored 12 points along with Mercedes Brooks scoring 10.
LSU fired on all cylinders, from scoring to board play. They out-rebounded the Lady Choctaws 53-16. With their 21 offensive rebounds, LSU was able to score 12 second chance points.
LSU will host a total of 14 games in the PMAC during the 2019-20 season. Fans can purchase season tickets at LSUtix.net. There are also two mini-plans available for purchase Half-Season Pick’em Plan and The SEC Pack.
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Head Coach Nikki Fargas Post Game Quotes
On everyone on the team contributing to the win…
“Looking at Awa and Tiara’s performances – the more they play, the better they’re going to get. They’re going to become more familiar with what we’re trying to do on the defensive end. Offensively, those two young ladies are pretty talented as far as being able to score the basketball, and they did a nice job on the boards for us as well. I like that we were able to get a lot of minutes distributed amongst the team, because I really want to see what our rotation is going to look like when we go to players numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9. And when you have Ayana Mitchell not playing tonight, it definitely opens up the door for other players to step in and step up. And I felt like we did that tonight.”
On there not being a drop off when going to the bench this year…
“No, it shouldn’t. I mean, we should have the depth and experience on our bench. Jaelyn Richard-Harris is an experienced guard. (Jailin) Cherry’s been in our system now going on her third year. And Mercedes Brooks is an experienced player as well. And so those guys have gotten a lot of minutes from last year. Once we get Rakell Spencer back to 100%, she’s another player (to go to). So there’s four players right there that we know have proven that they can play at this elite level and help us. So we just want to keep encouraging everyone. The starters to always get us off to a great start, but I also challenged them after every timeout. When you come off the bench, the score is 0-0, you either need to push the lead ahead, or if we’re not ahead, you need to get us ahead. And so just challenging them to always win the little battles. So then at the end of the game, we haven’t lost any segments.”
On being able to win the rebound margin and gaining experience…
“There were some missed shots in the paint like several times where we would shoot it, get it back and then shoot it and miss and shoot it and miss and it was like we’re trying to get their offensive rebounds stats up or something. But we got to clean that up and we got to knock down those shots. But it wasn’t a lack of being aggressive. It wasn’t a lack of wanting that ball to go in the hole. I liked that we stayed true to our defensive goals, where we don’t want to give up a lot of points and our game goal for Mississippi College was in the 40s.
Offensively I really thought that this team could be at 80 or more points easily. But when you don’t have Mitchell, and honestly I wanted to play my bench a lot more. The score could have gone the other way a little bit. But this game is for me to get experience and exposure for my bench, for the starters to kind of get in the rhythm and showcase what they’re supposed to do and play at the level they’re supposed to play. And then for players to step in and be just as effective.”