There was a nice crowd and it was fairly vocal. However, the cheerleaders certainly know how to quiet the crowd down during time-outs with their pyramid building at mid-court - strange.
Their small gal (listed at 5'6" but didn't look that tall) tore us up. She was super aggressive, and once she got three fouls early in the 2nd half, I figured that was a good sign. Not so much - the refs were extremely kind to her, refusing to call any more fouls on her regardless of how reckless she was. One particular call was an obvious charge on her, but the call went against us. Another particularly bad call was near the end when their #2 had major trouble with the ball, falling onto the floor and bouncing around a bit - no walking call but the refs awarded UCLA a time out, which had not been called until after she had clearly walked with the ball.
Our girls seemed a bit lethargic until the end, or maybe UCLA was just out-hustling us. It was very bad shot-clock management on our part with the gals waiting until the shot clock was down to about six to eight seconds before they realized time was short. By then, we would throw up a desperation shot, which inevitably was a miss with them rebounding it easily. Also, our passing was not crisp and very lackadaisical - thus the turnovers.
I really felt that if our team would have driven to the basket more, things would have turned out differently, but that didn't happen too often. They missed Bussie terribly, because our team seemed ineffective under the basket as several of them were standing around quite a bit.
I can see what Carey meant when he said that too many of the team didn't seem to care throughout the season, because they showed a bit of that today. Seemed to lack vocal leaders who demand their teammates play to their potential. Either they don't get along real well or maybe get along too well, because there wasn't much challenging amongst themselves.
But, congrats to them for getting that far. We lost an awful lot of good seniors last year and played with several girls with very little game-time experience.
Their small gal (listed at 5'6" but didn't look that tall) tore us up. She was super aggressive, and once she got three fouls early in the 2nd half, I figured that was a good sign. Not so much - the refs were extremely kind to her, refusing to call any more fouls on her regardless of how reckless she was. One particular call was an obvious charge on her, but the call went against us. Another particularly bad call was near the end when their #2 had major trouble with the ball, falling onto the floor and bouncing around a bit - no walking call but the refs awarded UCLA a time out, which had not been called until after she had clearly walked with the ball.
Our girls seemed a bit lethargic until the end, or maybe UCLA was just out-hustling us. It was very bad shot-clock management on our part with the gals waiting until the shot clock was down to about six to eight seconds before they realized time was short. By then, we would throw up a desperation shot, which inevitably was a miss with them rebounding it easily. Also, our passing was not crisp and very lackadaisical - thus the turnovers.
I really felt that if our team would have driven to the basket more, things would have turned out differently, but that didn't happen too often. They missed Bussie terribly, because our team seemed ineffective under the basket as several of them were standing around quite a bit.
I can see what Carey meant when he said that too many of the team didn't seem to care throughout the season, because they showed a bit of that today. Seemed to lack vocal leaders who demand their teammates play to their potential. Either they don't get along real well or maybe get along too well, because there wasn't much challenging amongst themselves.
But, congrats to them for getting that far. We lost an awful lot of good seniors last year and played with several girls with very little game-time experience.
