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TCU Beats Rice For Third Time, 76-58
3/10/2001 12:00:00 AM | Tulsa Hurricane
March 10, 2001
The regular season champion TCU Lady Frogs advanced to the finals of the conference tournament for the first time in school history on Friday afternoon, after discarding the fifth-seeded Rice Owls by a score of 76-58. With the WAC Tournament victory, the Frogs increased their school-record season mark to 23-7.
The early going was played extremely tight, as neither team was able to break free. TCU picked up the pace however and turned an 18-17 deficit at the 9:40 mark into a 39-31 halftime lead. The highlight of the spurt came when Amy Porter deflected a Rice pass to fellow guard Ashanti Nix. Nix led a 3-on-1 fast break, then dumped the ball to Jill Sutton in the lane, who found her sister open in the right corner for a three-pointer that gave the Frogs a 28-21 cushion.
Ebony Shaw sparked the Frogs off the bench, scoring nine points on 4-for-4 shooting in the first half. Nine TCU players entered the scoring column in the stanza as the Frogs netted 51.9 percent of their shots. For the game, TCU shot an even 50 percent, reaching the mark for the fourth time in the 2000-01 season.
TCU boosted the lead to 15 straight out of intermission. Amy Porter scored five of TCU's first seven points and in the process moved into third place on TCU's all-time scoring list with 1,159 points. The Frogs kept pushing the Owls, and scored 17 of the game's last 21 points to win by 18. TCU beat the Owls by an average of 18.3 points per game in three contests.
Kati Safaritova scored 18 points to lead TCU, while Porter and Sutton added 15 and 14 respectively. TCU hit nine three-pointers in the contest, the 15th time the Frogs have hit that many in a game.
The Frogs improved to 9-0 in afternoon contests this season and 10-3 in games outside of Fort Worth. TCU is now 18-2 when scoring at least 70 points.
The Frogs will play the winner of No. 2 Hawai'i and No. 3 SMU on Saturday, March 10 at 12:30 p.m. in the WAC Championship. The game will be televised nationally on FOX Sports Net. The winner of the conference tourney receives an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament, which will be played beginning on March 16.
