If Navy women’s basketball hopes to live up to its preseason billing as the favorites to win the Patriot League, it will need to play much better than they did Saturday in its conference home opener.
The Midshipmen were outmuscled and outhustled for most of the game by Holy Cross, who pulled away in the fourth quarter for a convincing 66-55 win.
Senior forward Meg Cahalan led all scorers with 22 points and junior guard Kendall Eddy added 21 points for a Holy Cross team that is now 8-5 on the season and, more importantly, has opened conference play with two road wins.
Navy (7-6, 1-1) was led by junior Zanai Barnett-Gay and sophomore Julianna Almeida, who scored 15 points apiece.
The Midshipmen made four of their first seven shots to take an early 8-5 lead, which they extended to a seven-point advantage on back-to-back 3-pointers by Almeida and sophomore Mary Gibbons.
“That’s how we want to play,” Navy coach Tim Taylor said. “We want to be able to get up and down the court and bottom line is we did that early. We got out to the lead but couldn’t sustain it.”
Ball handling became an issue for Navy in the first quarter which allowed Holy Cross to stay in the game early on. With just under two minutes left in the quarter, Gibbons threw the ball away and Eddy was able to convert an easy lay-up as a result to pull the Crusaders within two points, 16-14. It was one of four turnovers in the quarter for the Mids, who still managed to lead for almost the entire first 10 minutes of the game.
In the second quarter, Holy Cross started to pound the ball inside through Cahalan, who got several open looks because of defensive breakdowns by Navy. It didn’t help that the Mids were now struggling to hit a shot, outside of Almeida and Gibbons. The duo scored eight of Navy’s 10 points in the period on 3 of 4 shooting while the rest of the team was a meager 1-for-14 from the field.
With Navy leading 30-29, Cahalan drew a questionable foul by Navy center Kate Samson who seemed to take the brunt of the collision in the nose and had to leave the game with just over two minutes left in the half. It was a critical play as Holy Cross finished the half on a 4-0 run and Samson, the Mids’ best paint player, was lost for the remainder of the game.
“She’s definitely huge for our team and losing her in the second really sucked,” Almeida said. “But we tried our best to cover for that and [Morgan] Demos and Lizzie [Holder] were doing great…on their bigs.
“Obviously, [losing Samson] had a huge impact. She was a huge part of what we were trying to do, trying to get her the basketball,” said Taylor. “I think the biggest thing for us with not having her — it took away a rim presence.”
The third quarter was a bit of a defensive slugfest as neither team shot particularly well, but with Samson out, the Crusaders started to dominate in the paint, outrebounding the Mids 14-6 in the stanza. However, Barnett-Gay kept Navy close as she scored six of Navy’s 14 points on driving layups as the Mids only trailed by one, 45-44, headed into the fourth quarter.
Barnett-Gay’s free throw with eight minutes remaining in the game tied the score at 47, but that’s when the Mids began to unravel. Holy Cross senior guard Kaitlyn Flanagan drove the floor for an impressive lay-up which was followed immediately by an Eddy steal. The junior then calmly stepped beyond the arc for a 3-point, momentum swinging basket that Navy never seemed to recover from.
The Mids’ next four possessions were disastrous. Freshman guard Zoe Mesuch, who scored 38 points in Navy’s past two games, barely hit the rim on a 3-pointer; Barnett-Gay’s jump shot rattled out; senior Maren Louridas launched a 3-pointer that missed everything; and Barnett-Gay dribbled the ball off her leg.
“We’re not going to win a lot games with [Mesuch] not getting any points from the field. And we are not going to win a lot of games when we go 6-30 [on three-point shots],” Taylor said.
“For whatever reason, it seemed like they just took us out of our rhythm. I think from the start, I just felt like we were out of sync.”
Navy only made two field goals in the final eight minutes which made it pretty easy for Holy Cross to close out the game behind Flanagan’s ball handling and some clutch free throw shooting.
The Crusaders also outrebounded Navy, 48-34.
“They’re just a really veteran team and we just have to play more our basketball,” Almeida said. “I feel like we kind of tried to adapt to them this game. But for sure next time we see them, we’re going to play more of our style ball.”
“We’re just going to move on. We’re trying to get better for March. We will watch the film and see what we need to do,” said Taylor.
Navy returns to action Wednesday when it takes on Bucknell in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
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