Photo courtesy Quinnipiac Athletics
By: Morey Hershgordon
The Quinnipiac women’s basketball team traveled to Philadelphia for the second consecutive season. This time, it was one game, not two. Monday afternoon’s affair against the Drexel Dragons did not go as planned. Quinnipiac shot just 22.7% from the floor en route to a 62-49 loss at the Daskalakis Athletic Center. The team is now off for a week until it travels to face nationally-acclaimed Florida Gulf Coast University on Dec. 28. Below are three takeaways from the game:
A 10-day break in action was evident early on
Quinnipiac hosted Manhattan on Saturday Dec. 6 and lost for the first time at home in 17 games 52-42. The Bobcats shot 21.3% from the field. The next game it scored 71 points in a double-digit victory at Northeastern. Then, it was dreaded finals week. Long hours of studying coupled with lackadaisical practices resulted in a slow start Monday. Quinnipiac opened the game shooting 1-for-9 and finished the first half at a miserable 14.7%. It was 0-for-11 from three.
Fabbri: “Eleven points, totally anemic. Just really hard to watch. I thought our practices back were not our best. We weren’t at our best. For whatever reason they weren’t sharp, they weren’t what they needed to be.”
No Gold Rush meant a lot of confusion
Tricia Fabbri has nurtured her program into one that relies on depth. She approaches every recruit that way. She approaches every practice that way. And she approaches every game that way. For the first time in the better part of four years, Tricia Fabbri and Co. went an entire game without runnning the patented Quinnipiac “Gold Rush”. The five-in, five-out substitution method was not utilized. The Bobcats have 15 players on their roster. Bri Ramos and Jen Fay are out for the season and Edel Thornton and Morgan Manz were sidelined. That left only 11 active players, two of which were walk-ons. Realistically, that leaves just nine. Then, Brittany Johnson and Paula Satrautmane each picked up two personal fouls early in the contest. The lack of depth and familiarity with a new system was apparent.
Fabbri: “Anything that’s change to this team, has an affect on us. We needed 20 minutes somehow to figure out something really new. For [a program] that’s ran five in and five out for how long. And it negatively affected us for the first 20 minutes.”
Nonetheless, the grit and fight will always be there
Despite its third lowest scoring first half in program history, Quinnipiac came out of the locker room with the first 20 minutes behind itself and fought hard in the final half. The Bobcats edged the Dragons in the second half outscoring the hosts 38-36. Grit and toughness were displayed. Despite being down by more than 20 points, players were on the floor diving for loose balls, were in the right spots to draw charges and were crashing the offensive glass to create second and third opportunities. The Bobcats used a 12-0 run in the fourth quarter to cut a 22-point deficit to just 10 with 3 minutes remaining. But, it never saw its deficit reach single digits.
Fabbri: “You just have to fight through it. You know, you have to get better. You have to improve offensively. It’s a challenge. It’s just the growth and the inconsistencies that we’re going to have to handle and keep perspective on. And not get too high or too low.”
