Texas women’s basketball drops Big 12 opener to TCU, 65-63

By Riley Zayas

The third quarter was the killer for the Texas women’s basketball team Friday night, as it fell, 65-63, in the their closest game of the season to unranked TCU to begin Big 12 play. The loss came down to the final seconds, but really, the troubles for Texas started long before the final buzzer.

“The third quarter was the difference,” Aston said after the game. “That’s the reason we lost, not the final play of the game.”

Coming into the first game of Big 12 action, a league [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level2)]TCU head coach Raegan Pebley has said she believes is the toughest in the country, Texas was riding a four-game win streak and looking to add a fifth straight, especially at home in front of a large Texas crowd (the announced attendance at the Frank Erwin Center was 3,502).

From the outset, the Horns’ shooting that had helped them to big victories over Stanford and Tennessee had gone cold. UT (8-5 overall, 0-1 in Big 12 games) shot 35.9 percent from the floor, including just 22 percent in the first quarter; for the season, they are connecting on 41.5 percent of their field goals.

Perhaps UT’s best stretch in the game came in the second quarter, as the Longhorns played with an aggressive mentality that got them multiple takeaways, even with a different group of players out on the floor. At one point, post players Charli Collier and Joyner Holmes had to go to the bench after they each picked up multiple fouls. So Aston was forced to put five guards in the game. Led by Sug Sutton, the small lineup kept the score close and Texas trailing by just five at the half. TCU headed to the locker room with a 27-22 lead after playing one of its best halves of the season on the road against a ranked opponent which had not lost at home to the Horned Frogs in 43 years.

In what Aston has repeatedly called Texas’ worst quarter of the season, the third once again proved to be a low point for the Longhorns, who scored just 13 points while allowing the Horned Frogs to respond with 23.

“I think I’ve said this before, but the third quarter has not been our best quarter — probably in every game we’ve played,” Aston said after the game. “It was a problem tonight. I don’t know what the reason is, why we aren’t coming out of halftime very well, but you can’t go a stretch of four or five minutes and not play defense in our league or against anybody that’s any good.”

One high point of the quarter was the play of Holmes, who scored six straight points at the end of the quarter. After swishing two free throws to give UT a two-point lead, at 39-37, she rebounded a missed three-pointer by guard Lashann Higgs and while in the air, put the ball back up as it rolled around the rim before falling through the net. Moments like these, though, were hard to come by throughout the second half. TCU got back-to-back threes from Michelle Berry and Lauren Heard. A timeout by Aston did some good for the Longhorns, who cut the lead to five, at 50-45, heading into the the fourth quarter.

Sophomore Audrey Warren, who had been sidelined for the first 11 games of the season while in concussion protocol, knocked down two straight jumpers to pull Texas to within five, and then stole the ball on TCU’s next possession. A Celeste Taylor three-pointer cut the lead to just six, at 58-52. But with just five minutes left, the team was dealt a blow when Taylor, who had served as a floor general throughout the ballgame, fouled out of the game on a controversial call. Texas crawled back into the game and took a 63-61 lead on a Higgs three with a minute left. However, the Horned Frogs scored the final four points, including a layup in traffic by Berry with 6.7 seconds left to take the lead for good.

Every loss in Big 12 play is tough to swallow, especially those that slip away in the final moments. But one message Aston, Sutton and Higgs reiterated throughout the postgame press conference was that this loss can’t be dwelled on for long, as the Longhorns play their next game Monday at Iowa State, a team sure to challenge the Longhorns.

“We have another game coming up,” said Sutton, who had 10 points and five assists. “So we can’t get down on ourselves for too long. We just have to move on, get better as a team and focus on what we need to do.”

While it’s easy to dwell on the negatives in any loss, but this game did some very good things for this young Texas squad. Most importantly, it gave the underclassmen a taste of the high-level of basketball that conference play brings, and it revealed some of the areas, like blocking out and limiting turnovers, that the Longhorns will need to correct in time for Monday’s game. But the most important area of them all was competitiveness.

“What this boils down to is that this was a competitive game,” Aston said. “You have to beat people to spots and you have to have a desire to get to the ball. We had a sense of urgency late in the third quarter and in the fourth quarter but you can’t go three quarters of a quarter without any kind of urgency. It’s unacceptable.”

The loss to TCU could be the wake up call Texas needs, and the motivation for many hard-eanred victories down the road.

“Credit to TCU,” Aston said. “They were more solid for 40 minutes than we (were), and that’s who’s going to win the majority of games in this league.”
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