Women’s hoops wins third in a row

The Oregon State women's basketball team (14-7, 5-5 Pac-12) won its third game in a row, beating Colorado (15-6, 4-6 Pac-12) 65-45 in front of 1,159 at Gill Coliseum Thursday night.

The game started out slow for both teams, but Oregon State would get confident defensively, which translated to offense, allowing them to go on a 22-2 run in the first half.

"The key to that run is that the defense was phenomenal," head coach Scott Rueck said. "I thought we played their post perfectly, and stayed in front of the ball. This is a team that drives the ball a lot, and lives off of that in a lot of ways, and we didn't let that happen."

The Beavers held Colorado to the lowest scoring first-half output (17 points) in the Pac-12 this season.  The defensive effort created 22 turnovers, and seven Beavers combined for 15 steals. Rueck was proud of the defensive anticipation as a theme for the evening.

"We are anticipating better. That is the key to this," Rueck said. "Once you can relax, and anticipate where the offense is going with the ball, and play the angles correctly, which is what we did tonight, we force their team to weaknesses all night, and if you're going to your weaknesses it's sometimes not pretty."

Offensively, junior guard Sage Indendi moved into fourth all-time for 3-pointers made in school history, going 2-for-2 from behind the arc to move her career total to 106.

The Beavers were able to keep their lead the whole game, allowing no lead changes. That was a far cry from their previous conference losses, which all seemingly came down to the game's final possessions.

"We really gave ourselves permission to not play to the scoreboard, and kept in the game, it could have been easy to get lazy, but we stayed focused," Indendi said.

"This was a 40-minute game where we made few errors, and we held them under 50 points," Rueck said. "This was a great performance for our team and a good win."

The Beavers hope to build on their success as their defensive identity clashes with Utah this Saturday.  

"Utah is a great defensive team, they love that end of the floor, it's another one, they are going to know our tendencies, they are going to have the scout on us, and really make us work to score," Rueck said. "So I anticipate a defensive battle and another tough night in the Pac-12."

Jacob Shannon, sports writer

Twitter: shannon_app

sports@dailybarometer.com