NATCHITOCHES -- Huddled around their first-year coach, the Cowgirls screamed in unison, imploring one another for just one stop the player who was, for 40 minutes, unstoppable.
McNeese State guards Caitlin Davis and Amber Donnes smothered Beatrice Attura, the Northwestern State senior guard who’d single handedly gotten her team to this point. Mercedes Rogers stood feet away, her eyes fixated on inbounder Sami Thomas.
“She was looking at her the whole time,” Rogers said. “I read the eyes the whole way.”
Rogers intercepted the pass, inbounded with 7.1 seconds left and the Cowgirls nursing a 66-63 lead, sealing McNeese’s first Southland Conference win, 68-63, against the Lady Demons on Saturday at Prather Coliseum.
Attura reached to foul, her last gasp on a day where, perhaps, she deserved a better fate. Rogers nailed the two free throws on the other end, the Cowgirls’ 22nd and 23rd freebies of the afternoon, sending the bench into bedlam and Attura running down the floor for a meaningless shot attempt.
Attura, the senior averaging 16.9 points per game, set new career-highs for points scored, field goal attempts, field goals made and 3-pointers made, eviscerating the cold-shooting, foul-plagued Cowgirls for 34 points.
She attempted 26 of her team’s 56 field goals, made all six of its 3-pointers and was the only Lady Demon in double figures, taking advantage of the Cowgirls’ dire foul trouble all afternoon. McNeese was whistled for 21 fouls but, to put that in perspective, went to the free-throw line 28 times on an opponent’s floor. Northwestern shot 13 freebies.
Amber Donnes, always tasked with guarding an opponent’s best player and, in this case, Attura, played just six first half minutes with foul trouble.
Attura carved the cycle of Cowgirls tasked with defending her, pouring in 19 of her 34 in the game’s first 20 minutes while the Cowgirls neglected to switch off Northwestern State’s physical ball screens.
“We just kind of really got lackadaisical with her, not knowing where she was at times,” Cryer said. “It’s just little things … She’s a really tough player.”
The Cowgirls, the conference’s third-best shooting team entering the proceedings, limped to a 33 percent clip from the field and drained just four 3-pointers — two of which came from senior Hannah Cupit in the best game of her career.
Thrust into her most prominent action of the season given the foul trouble, Cupit poured in a career-high 19 points on 6-of-12 shooting.
Her trey from the left wing with 1:54 left in the first quarter was the Cowgirls’ first made 3-pointer in six attempts. They made just one more throughout a physical, foul-filled first half where Rogers and Donnes played just six minutes apiece and McNeeese made just 11 shots.
“You can’t think about the shots we missed,” Cupit said. “They were really guarding out on (Victoria Rachal), Amber (Donnes) and Caitlin (Davis), so they were leaving lanes open.”
Davis added 17 and Frederica Haywood chipped in a double-double of 13 points and 17 rebounds. Seven of Haywood’s 17 rebounds came in the fourth quarter, where the Cowgirls were down as many as five before uncorking a 13-3 run to finish the game.
Davis, who drove the lane seemingly at will, hit two of her four free throws in that span. She went to the free-throw line six times in the first half and 10 times for the game.
Victoria Rachal, the team’s leading scorer who’d missed her first eight shots, drained a baseline runner with 10 seconds left that put the Cowgirls up 66-63, a lead they would not relinquish thanks to that one lockdown of Attura.
“This group, they’re a fun group,” Cryer said. “This whole team, this is what they do. All those games before this prepared us for this moment. We’ve been in a lot of close games. And we finally won it.”
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