The Dominican University women's basketball team could not keep up with the high scoring Wisconsin Lutheran College Warriors, falling 80-51 in Northern Athletics Collegiate Conference (NACC) action at the Igini Sports Forum on Saturday afternoon.
The Warriors led from wire-to-wire as Kelly Tramburg buried a three on Wisconsin Lutheran's first possession, one of four threes in the game for Tramburg who scored a game-high 24 points.
Dominican managed to keep up with the Warriors for the first eight minutes of the first quarter as
Alexis Hoskins's layup with 2:57 to play in the opening quarter narrowed the Stars gap down to two, 15-13 before the Warriors used a 10-0 run to close the period and led by double-digits the rest of the way.
As a team, Wisconsin Lutheran shot better than 60-percent from the field in the first half, going 17-for-28 from the field en route to a 48-23 halftime lead. For the game, the Warriors converted at a near 54-percent clip, including going 9-for-21 from three.
For the Stars,
Alisha Markley led the way with ten points on 5-for-10 shooting. Hoskins and
Timiya Ray added eight points apiece but Dominican shot just 20-for-55 from the field and connected on just one of nine attempts from three.
"Today was tough for us as a team," said Amanda Parker, the Stars' first-year head women's basketball coach. "Nothing really clicked for us on either end. We talked in pregame about containing their dynamic duo inside, with Dowden and Elrod, which we did a decent job on. However, others stepped up for them. WLC is a really great team and I will take nothing away from them, but we cannot continue to dig ourselves a hole at the beginning of games. We are continually beating ourselves and we have to find a way to get better at every aspect of the game."
The loss drops the Stars to 6-4 overall and 2-3 in the NACC. Dominican will close out the 2018 portion of the schedule on Tuesday, traveling to Roosevelt University for an exhibition contest with the Lakers. Tipoff is scheduled for 5:30 p.m.
