Women's basketball finds early season confidence

Women’s basketball finds early season confidence

By Brian Farrell, QBSN Staff Writer

Courtesy: quinnipiacbobcats.com

While most folks across America were stuffing their faces with turkey and pumpkin pie, the Quinnipiac women’s basketball squad was busy making a national statement.

Last holiday weekend, the Bobcats traveled to Concord, Calif. to participate in the St. Mary's Concord Hilton Thanksgiving Classic. Along with the Bobcats and the host St. Mary’s, the University of Minnesota and Virginia Tech made the trip to the west coast for the holiday tournament.

“Every year we go out and play in a national tournament,” said Quinnipiac head coach Tricia Fabbri. “We’ve seen Vanderbilt, we’ve seen Miami, we’ve seen tournament teams, and this year we had Minnesota up first.”

After a convincing win over Fairfield earlier in the week, the Bobcats were able to bring some of that confidence to the court against the Golden Gophers. So much confidence that QU was able to rely on freshman guard Jasmine Martin (Sickerville, N.J.) to knock down the game winning shot with less than two seconds left for the 64-62 win.

“When the game was tied we had the chance to put the isolation play on for our freshman Jasmine Martin,” said Fabbri.  “We had put the play in for two days and we were able to get the ball into her hands and it just worked to perfection like it did in practice…I don’t know how the ball went in. It was just Jas one on one confidence as a freshman really in her fourth collegiate game just doing what we knew she could do for us.”

Junior Felicia Barron (Springfield, Mass.) led the game with 18 points and admitted the team was a little nervous for that first game against Minnesota.

“When we first got there we were down on ourselves thinking that we weren’t going to win because they are a bigger team than us, but when we got on the court we just looked up and noticed they had the same jerseys we had on,” said Barron.  “From there we were just trying to play hard and play as a team.”

The magic would continue the next night as Quinnipiac defeated host team St. Mary’s 69-67. Once again Barron would lead the team in points, this time with 17.

The game featured six lead changes and was tied on eight occasions.

“We were down thirteen at one point and we were able to come back and with 19 seconds left in the game, we were able to play tight defense and seal the deal,” Barron said. 

Following the game Barron was announced as the tournament’s Most Valuable Player.

Despite the late game heroics of Martin and the consistent offensive production of Barron, coach Fabbri believes the key to their success lies on the other end of the court.

“I’m going to give a lot of credit to our defense.  I think that’s where we are really trying to develop an identity. We know that we want to be fast in transition and score points, but we really are trying to have a better identity on defense. That’s where we are trying to improve, and I think that’s why we’ve been successful.”

Following Tuesday’s win against UMass, both Brittany McQuain (Independence, Mo.) and Camryn Warner (Keene, N.H.) stressed that this weekend the “real season” begins. Conference play will start up at noon tomorrow when the Bobcats host Bryant.