The University of Maine women’s basketball team handled Clemson of the Atlantic Coast Conference with a convincing victory last winter in Bangor.
The Tigers exhibited some payback on Friday evening at Littlejohn Coliseum in Columbia, South Carolina, opening the fourth quarter on an 11-0 run en route to a 69-61 victory over the Black Bears.
Clemson won its eighth consecutive game to open the season while coach Richard Barron’s Black Bears fell to 3-5. UMaine beat Clemson last season 75-42.
Victoria Cardaci helped the Tigers break it open early in the fourth, igniting an 11-0 Clemson surge with a pair of perimeter shots sandwiched around a pair of Nellie Perry free throws and Aliyah Collier jumper, which marked the first double-digit lead of the game for either team (57-43).
By the time Julie Brousseau stopped the bleeding with a 3-pointer, Clemson had assumed control of the game.
Collier led the Tigers with 21 points, and Danielle Edwards had 20 and Collier 13. Sigi Koizar was the Black Bears’ lone double-digit scorer with 21 points on 7-for-17 shooting, including 5-for-11 from 3-point range.
Clemson led by as many as 16 in the fourth quarter, and UMaine could get no closer than seven.
The Black Bears also experienced significant foul trouble, not taking a free throw in the second half until Koizar hit a pair just after the halfway point of the fourth quarter.
Clemson took 31 free throws compared with UMaine’s 10, but Barron attributed that to the Tigers’ aggression down low.
“The fouls didn’t go our way because we didn’t do what we needed to do,” Barron told Learfield’s Don Shields. “Credit them for being the more aggressive team today.”
UMaine also turned the ball over 18 times and shot 41 percent (23 of 55) from the field.
“We need to play better,” Barron said. “We can play better. We made a lot of bad decisions especially with [facing] the double-teams down low.”
The Black Bears trailed by as many as five in a back-and-forth first quarter, but UMaine would end the quarter with an 8-1 run to take a four-point lead after the first 10 minutes.
UMaine would lead by as many as seven in the second quarter, but a Black Bear scoring drought spanning nearly six minutes allowed the Tigers to claw their way back into the contest.
The teams went into the locker room tied at 29. The Black Bears committed five second-quarter turnovers.
Koizar came out of the gates hot in the second half for UMaine, connecting on three third-quarter 3-pointers, but Edwards was just as big for the Tigers, as she scored nine points to help Clemson take a four-point lead into the final period.
UMaine would endure yet another long scoring dry spell, going nearly four minutes without a bucket until a Tanesha Sutton jumper late in the period.
Sutton would finish with nine points for UMaine, and Sheraton Jones recorded a career-high eight rebounds.
“We know we have the talent to win, we just don’t know how to do it yet,” Barron said. “We’ll get there.”
UMaine faces Northeastern at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor.
