RIVERSIDE, Calif. >> Hawaii Pacific will play for the championship of the PacWest Conference women’s basketball tournament after surviving an attempted upset by the tournament’s lowest-seeded team.
Spencer Gray made a free throw with seven seconds to play and the second-seeded Sharks escaped Cal Baptist’s events center with a 71-67 win over sixth-seeded Dominican on Friday.
The Sharks (25-3), ranked fourth in the West Region by the NCAA and 22nd nationally by the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association, will face fourth-seeded Point Loma in tonight’s final. The Sea Lions (19-10) upset top-seeded Azusa Pacific, which shared the regular-season championship with the Sharks.
“For us to come out on top, we have to be on point defensively,” said HPU coach Reid Takatsuka, the PacWest’s coach of the year. “We have to make a conscious effort to get stops. One of our strengths is defense and I think if we’re defensively strong, we’ll be in the game.”
Dominican’s Natalie Diaz and Sandra Ikeora kept the Penguins (18-12) in Friday’s game. Ikeora scored 18 points despite playing just 17 minutes. The senior received three fouls in the game’s first 4 minutes, 13 seconds.
Diaz, the PacWest’s leading scorer and co-player of the year, led all scorers with 27 points while demonstrating superior agility and tenacity. On one play in the second quarter, HPU’s Anna Mumm and Alysha Marcucci tightly double-teamed Diaz. But the junior burst through the barrier and found space to execute a reverse lay-in.
“Diaz is one of those kids who you contain,” Takatsuka said. “You can’t really stop her. She’s that good.”
Dominican kept pace despite the loss of the nation’s leading 3-point shooter, Alanna Scott, who was shooting 50.4 percent from 3-point range before spraining her ankle in Thursday’s first-round victory over third-seeded Cal Baptist.
With Scott out, the Sharks believed they could focus their defensive effort on Diaz and Ikeora.
“We felt we could really double-down a lot harder, which is hard to do against those two post players because they’re really good post players,” HPU guard Samantha Lambrigsten said. “So we had to do our best to double-team them and then try to scramble back on their 3-point shooters.”
But the Penguins used their 2-3 zone defense to control the interior and generate turnovers. Dominican out-rebounded HPU in the first half, 25-24, and outscored the Sharks in the lane, 18-14. Meanwhile, the Penguins forced 12 first-half turnovers and used them to score 12 points.
In the second half, HPU relied on Mumm, Marcucci and Janessa Manzano to repel Dominican. Manzano, second to Scott nationally in 3-point shooting, made two of four shots from beyond the arc in scoring 10 of her 15 total points while Marcucci amassed 12 of her team-high 19 points.
But Mumm played the pivotal role. With Jessica Harley having fouled out and with Jessi Reeves and Gabriella Fotu fighting foul trouble, Mumm scored all eight of her points while collecting eight rebounds and two blocks in 10 second-half minutes. Besides her eight points, Mumm finished with 11 rebounds and four rebounds.
“Her presence in the paint was unbelievable, actually,” Takatsuka said of the 6-foot-2 senior. “She really gave us a spark defensively.”
Both teams exchanged the lead six times and tied the score five times. Diaz’s underhanded lay-in with 6:46 to play forged the last tie, 50-50. But with HPU holding a 62-60 lead, Reeves made a driving lay-in and Marcucci added a 3-point shot to extend the Sharks’ advantage to 67-60 with 2:12 left.
Julia Razo’s 3-pointer with 8.3 seconds remaining drew Dominican within three at 70-67. But after Vanessa Cruz fouled Gray with seven seconds to go, the point guard made the first of two free throws in the double bonus.
“I thought it was a hard-fought game,” Dominican coach Tim LaKose said. “Both teams were grinding it out. One more stop, one more score, and we’d be playing for the championship.”