By Jamie H. Vaught
UK women took advantage of its size and sticky defense to overcome its poor three-point shooting performance as the taller Wildcats stopped an undersized Northern Kentucky team 70-41 Thursday night before a crowd of 4,188 at Historic Memorial Coliseum.
Kentucky only shot 20 percent of its three-point field goal attempts, hitting only 5 of 25 downtown jumpers, but they had twin towers in 6-foot-5 sophomore Clara Strack and 6-foot-7 freshman Clara Silva to fix the problem. Besides scoring, they blocked shots and grabbed rebounds.
The duo of Strack and Silva combined to score 33 points with Silva hitting a game-high 18 points along with five blocks. Strack posted a double-double with 15 points and 13 rebounds in addition to four blocks and eight assists despite foul trouble.
That’s not all. How about 6-foot-3 junior Amelia Hassett? She snatched a game-high 16 rebounds along with five points.
“They (Northern Kentucky) were undersized. … We blocked lot of shots, we used our strength with our height and our length,” said first-year UK coach Kenny Brooks in a postgame press conference. “I thought we rebounded the ball decently, but we just need a little bit more in certain areas. A lot of that is just fundamental.”
Brooks, who saw his team block 16 shots and outrebound Northern Kentucky 52-34, said it is important to win the rebounding battle.
“That’s something that we put on the board before every game,” he said. “That's always been a point of emphasis with any team that I've ever coached. You have to win the rebound battle and sometimes we even say that whoever's going to win the rebound battle is going to win the game.
“So, we put a lot of focus on that. Our defense puts us in position to rebound the basketball extremely well, especially on the defensive end. We need to work on it on the offensive end, especially with the height that we have. But something that we really focus on is the rebounding battle.”
Kentucky, which overall hit 43.5 percent of its shots, dished out a total of 22 assists against the Norse. All-American point guard Georgia Amoore had eight assists in addition to 13 points.
Asked about his team’s unselfish play, Brooks said, “Yeah, that’s what our teams are based on. Our offense is based off of sharing the basketball. If we were giving out little stickers for doing well, I’d give them out for making the extra pass because we want to make sure we share the basketball. I think we had like 26 assists (against USC Upstate) the other night and those numbers are not uncommon for our teams and the way we play, with our style, our offense.”
Brooks, though, wasn’t that pleased with his team’s overall performance. He thought the Cats should have done a better job. There is room for improvement, he said.
“We always say energy and effort is worth eight points a game and I don’t think we utilized that tonight,” said Brooks. “When we start doing that and we start getting the hustle plays that we really want, I think the potential is through the roof. It really is.
“We’ve got to get some more production from our bench, but I like the pieces that we have. And we’ve just got to continue to work together, and we can get better.”
The next game for the Wildcats, now 2-0, is Tuesday when they host Wofford. The 6 p.m. (ET) game will be seen on SEC Network+.
Jamie H. Vaught, a longtime sports columnist in Kentucky, is the author of six books about UK basketball, including recently-published “Forever Crazy About The Cats: An Improbable Journey of a Kentucky Sportswriter Overcoming Adversity.” Now a retired college professor who taught at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Middlesboro., he is the editor and founder of KySportsStyle.com Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @KySportsStyle or reach him via email at KySportsStyle@gmail.com.
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