The Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Tournament officially began for the Quinnipiac women’s basketball team on Friday afternoon. The fourth-seeded Bobcats defeated the fifth-seeded Golden Griffins of Canisius 72-61 to move on to the MAAC semifinals.

The Bobcats got off to a strong start through the first half by their fifty-seven percent field goal percentage.

“We couldn’t have had a better start in our first MAAC playoff game,” said head coach Tricia Fabbri. “Our twenty minutes of basketball in the first half against Canisius was so efficient on offense and our defense was strong as well.”

The Bobcats led at halftime 44-21 and the biggest lead that Quinnipiac had through all of the game was by 27 points.

Ten minutes into the second half, the Bobcats continued to have a solid lead over the Griffins, but then Canisius was causing turnovers and making shots (which they were unable to do in the first half) and they pushed the Bobcats lead down to 15 at one point.

“At that point in the second half, we seemed to lose our intensity and that is the moment when we began to have turnovers and that can not happen very much for us to be successful,” said Fabbri.

Brittany McQuain is one player on the team that admits that they can still work on one huge part of their game.

“I do thing that us as a team, we need to be better at closing out games, especially in the last couple of minutes,” said McQuain.

McQuain scored 13 points for the Bobcats while Jasmine Martin and Adily Martucci scored ten points each for the Bobcats.

Quinnipiac was led by senior Camryn Warner who scored a team-high 17 points against the Golden Griffins.

The star of the game for the Griffins was Kayla Hoohuli who led all scorers with a total of 23 points against Tricia Fabbri’s squad.

Quinnipiac will play the number-one seeded Gaels of Iona College on Sunday morning at 11 a.m. for a spot in the MAAC Championship game against the winner of the Marist-Rider semifinal.

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