Senior guard Malia Tate-DeFreitas scored 24 points, and Hampton University outscored the cold-shooting University of Maine 15-6 in the third quarter en route to a 58-49 victory in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame Women’s Challenge Tuesday night at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina.
Both teams are 2-4.
The Pirates rattled off an 11-2 run to close out the third quarter and build a 41-33 lead and then scored six straight points midway through the fourth quarter after the Black Bears had used a seven-point run to claw within 46-42.
Tate-DeFreitas, the two-time Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference Player of the Year and one of just three active players with over 2,000 career points, also had five rebounds and four assists.
Junior forward Kayla Lupoe contributed 12 points, 10 rebounds and two blocked shots, and freshman guard Ashley Bates chipped in with nine points and two steals.
K’lynn Willis had six points and four rebounds, and Monnazjea Finney-Smith chipped in with five points and six rebounds.
Senior guard Sigi Koizar had a game-high 25 points for the Black Bears, including 18 of their 22 points in the second half. It was her 21st career game with 20 or more points, and she now has 1317 career points.
She was the only Black Bear in double figures.
Anita Kelava contributed seven points and four rebounds, and Laia Sole had six points, seven rebounds and three assists. Tanesha Sutton accounted for four points, three rebounds and two assists. Naira Caceres grabbed seven rebounds.
Tate-DeFreitas had seven points, and Lupoe had four during the 11-2 run in the third quarter.
Koizar tried to rally UMaine in the fourth quarter when she sandwiched two free throws and a 3-pointer around a Sutton basket off a Sole feed to make it 46-42.
But Tate-DeFreitas sank two free throws, Lupoe nailed a jumper, and Bates hit a runner to push the lead back up to 10 with 4:40 left, and UMaine couldn’t get any closer than seven the rest of the way.
After shooting 6-for-10 from the floor in the first quarter, UMaine shot 15-for-48 the rest of the way (31.3 percent) to wind up at 36.2 percent (21-58) for the game. The Black Bears continued their struggles beyond the 3-point arc, finishing with a 4-for-22 showing (18.2 percent).
UMaine led 13-4 in the first quarter.
Hampton shot 38 percent from the floor (24-for-63).
The Pirates outscored the Black Bears 40-22 from the paint and outrebounded UMaine 39-36.
UMaine had 18 turnovers to Hampton’s 12.
“It was a very poorly played game by us, no question about it,” UMaine coach Richard Barron told Learfield play-by-play man Don Shields after the game. “We got off to a good start but, after that, we didn’t play well. We didn’t show much toughness, we were really bad on the boards, we had really bad ball control, our defense was very poor, and we were really, really disjointed.
“Hampton certainly deserves credit. They played very hard. They were very aggressive. They attacked the rim,” said Barron. “But we have to take a lot of the blame for it. We didn’t execute in a game in which we could have done well.”
He said the fact they got outscored 40-22 in the paint by a smaller team isn’t acceptable.
“Our kids know that. We have to work on our toughness and our will to go out and execute,” added Barron, who also felt his team “let the game happen to them” rather than asserting themselves and taking the game to Hampton.
UMaine will conclude the tournament against 2015-16 NCAA Tournament team University of Tennessee at Chattanooga at 6 p.m. Sunday in Springfield, Massachusetts. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga will take a 3-3 record into a Friday game with Wisconsin-Green Bay.