In a battle of the Horizon League’s second and third place squads, the Youngstown State Penguins women’s basketball team (18-8, 11-5 Horizon) knocked off the Robert Morris Colonials (16-9, 9-7 Horizon) in an epic 69-62 overtime victory on Wednesday night inside Zidian Family Arena at Beeghly Center, with both teams grabbing 40 rebounds each.
Sarah Baker led all scorers with 21 points on 8-of-14 shooting. “It definitely helped us, gave us a second energy,” she said. “So’s [Sophia Gregory] play was awesome. I was like, ‘She’s so clutch!’ And I think that really got us all excited, and it really helped with our momentum coming into overtime. We just played so well off each other, we locked down on defense, and we did what we needed to do. It was really great.”
Sophia Gregory scored 15 points and pulled down a career-high 16 rebounds to go along with three blocks. Erica King scored a dozen points, while Casey Santoro had nine points and four steals. YSU shot 34.3 percent (22-of-64) from the field, 12.5 percent (2-of-16) on threes, and 79.3 percent (23-of-29) on threes.
Myriam Traore led RMU with 20 points, 13 points each for Aislin Malcolm and Bailey Kuhns, and 11 points off the bench from Noa Givon. Chandler McCabe’s Colonials shot 40.7 percent (24-of-59), 26.7 percent (4-of-15) from three-point territory, and 66.7 percent (10-of-15) from threes.
With two of the conference’s top defenses squaring off, the score was dead even at 11 at the end of the first quarter. In the second quarter, the Colonials outscored the home team 13-7 and were up 24-18 at the intermission.
RMU led by six on three different occasions in the third quarter, with the last one coming at 34-28 on a Traore bucket at the 3:06 mark, but YSU went on an 8-0 run with a Dacia Lewandowski bucket with the shot clock winding down, a three-point play from King, and a Cameron three to give YSU the lead at 36-34 with 37 seconds left. However, Malcolm scored for RMU on their last possession of the quarter to make it 36 all.
The Colonials began the fourth by making their first five field-goal attempts and scoring 13 of the first 21 points, with Givon’s layup and Malcolm’s free throws capping off that stretch to put RMU ahead at 51-44 at the 6:08 mark.
With the Penguins down big, they scored seven unanswered points to knot it up at 51 all with a bucket from King, a Baker free throw, and then a Santoro putback off an offensive rebound. On the next possession, Gregory rebounded Santoro’s miss, got fouled by Traore on the putback attempt, and made both free throws to knot it up with 13.2 seconds remaining.
Kuhns then scored on RMU’s next possession to give her team a 53-51 lead. Two-tenths of a second were added to the clock to give YSU just 0.4 seconds. That set up an inbound pass on Cameron’s textbook feed to Gregory, who ran toward the basket, jumped up in mid-air to catch the ball, and released it on the right side of the rim over two dark blue jerseys. The ball bounced on the rim three times before falling through to tie the game and send it into an extra session. The referees looked at the monitor just to make sure that Gregory got the ball out of her hands right before the buzzer sounded.
“I’ve been put in this situation before last year, and it did not go through obviously,” Gregory said regarding her shot. “But I was pretty calm. I knew what I had to do, and it was either gonna go in, or it wasn’t. You can’t think too much about it. So honestly, I wasn’t worried about it. I knew Dani [Cameron] was gonna make a good pass, but actually seeing it go through, that was pretty exciting. I don’t want to say I expected it or didn’t expect it. I was just kind of going with it, so it was pretty exciting.”
“Obviously, we’re waiting there to make sure, but I think we all knew it was good,” Penguins head coach Melissa Jackson said regarding Gregory’s heroic moments. “In those moments, just trying to stay composed. But I think it was the juice that we needed. You could feel that coming as we mounted that comeback, and I know we were down seven in the fourth quarter, so just really proud of them. A lot of people are gonna talk about the end of the game like Saturday, but I am so proud of this team for how aggressive they were. Night and day from when we played them at their place, right? We didn’t back down in that fourth quarter, and then we certainly didn’t back down into overtime going into that. I do think that was absolutely the juice that we needed, but it was also juice and composure that willed us to that win.”
Kuhns split a pair of free throws on RMU’s first possession of overtime, but the Penguins answered right back with eight straight points to go up 61-54. It started when Gregory tipped in her own miss, a fastbreak layup from Baker off a Gregory assist, two made free throws from King, and a turnaround shot from Baker with 2:30 remaining. The margin was at least five for the closing seconds of the night, and Santoro helped maintain the lead by going a perfect 6-for-6 from the foul line in the last minute before Gregory hit two free throws of her own to close out the scoring.
Up next: Youngstown State will visit IU Indy on Sunday for a 1 p.m. tip-off at The Jungle in Indianapolis.
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