ODU women drop first home game of the season, falling to Texas State on a night ‘where everything just seemed amiss.’
The Old Dominion women’s basketball team dropped its first home game of the season Thursday night, losing to Texas State 52-46.
The 46 points Old Dominion scored are a season-low. The previous low was 47 against Mississippi State.
With the loss, the Monarchs fell to 13-9 overall and 5-4 in the Sun Belt Conference.
Da’Nasia Hood and Ja’Kayla Bowie led Texas State with 18 and 13 points, respectively. Amari Young led the Monarchs, finishing with her seventh double-double of the year behind 12 points and 10 rebounds.
ODU led 34-31 with 9:14 left, but Texas State scored seven consecutive points and never trailed after that.
Old Dominion coach DeLisha Milton-Jones perfectly encapsulated the game in her postgame press conference, describing it as one with “too many lulls, and ups and downs.”
“Tonight was one of those quirky nights where everything just seemed amiss,” Milton-Jones said. “Nothing ever seemed solidified. Offensively, it was just good enough, but not quite there. Defensively, just good enough, but not quite there.”
Both teams seemed to be sleepwalking early, combining for just 42 points in the first half.
The offensive inconsistency wasn’t just limited to the first half, though.
Old Dominion held Texas State to just 31% shooting from the field in the first half, while the Monarchs mustered only 36%.
In the second half, the teams nearly flipped offensively.
Texas State improved to 37% from the field, but Old Dominion only shot 26%.
Milton-Jones stressed that shooting woes weren’t the only thing that aided in the Monarchs’ loss, saying that it was really a bit of everything.
“We had players fighting each other for rebounds,” Milton-Jones said. “We had players not reading the proper situations on the court, passing to the person with three people on them as opposed to passing it to the person with no one on them. These are the things that shot us in the foot.”
Old Dominion led for nearly 30 minutes, but started to let things fall apart late in the third quarter and into the fourth quarter.
The Monarchs managed only nine points in the third quarter.
The Bobcats found life offensively in the fourth quarter, outscoring Old Dominion 23-14. Milton-Jones said the combination of adjustments to ODU’s pick-and-roll defense by Texas State and lazy defensive effort were the cause for the scoring spike.
“It was those small things where you could tell we really weren’t focused and have a sense of urgency behind everything that we were doing, and it cost us,” Milton-Jones said.
After totaling eight turnovers in the first three quarters, Old Dominion nearly matched that number with six turnovers in the fourth.
Texas State sports an experienced roster with seven graduates and two seniors, and that veteran presence helped the Bobcats take advantage of those opportunities off turnovers, Milton-Jones said.
“You cannot turn the ball over 14 times, you can’t turn the ball over 10 [times],” Milton-Jones said. “Because what they’re going to do with that is they’re going to convert it into points and valuable possessions for themselves. Now if we’re playing against someone that has a roster that looks like ours, there’s an influx of young and old, then yeah, maybe 14 turnovers, we can survive that, but you can’t do that against a veteran team like that.”
Both teams made only one free throw in the first half, but fourth-quarter free throws were another key to the Bobcats walking away with a victory. Texas State was 10 for 14 from the line in the fourth quarter.
Old Dominion will have a shot to get back in the win column Saturday when it plays host to another Sun Belt opponent, Coastal Carolina, at 2 p.m.
“We have to remedy this rather quickly and get back to the foundation of who we are,” Milton-Jones said. “I feel like we lost a sense of what our identity is and we got away from the defensive execution that allows us to eat off of what we give defensively, or what we get from our defense.”
