Poor shooting sinks Pirates against South Florida

Another poor shooting performance from the East Carolina women’s basketball team led to a 79-48 loss against South Florida Saturday night, the Pirates’ second 31-point loss of the week.

"There's no doubt about it, it has been a very tough week for the Pirates,” said ECU head coach Heather Macy. "Obviously we played a nationally-ranked team that was not pleased with their last performance and they played that way.”

Hoping to cut down on turnovers, ECU (10-8, 1-4 AAC) inserted point guard Alex Frazier into the starting lineup for sharpshooter Antoinette Bannister. While the Pirates only committed 13 turnovers, they struggled shooting the ball, making 33 percent of their shots. The only Pirate to reach double figures in points was Kristen Gaffney, with 13 points on 6-for-12 shooting.

“I am going to need everybody involved in our program to continue to increase the intensity level because we will not accept losing, period,” Macy said.

The No. 20 Bulls (14-2, 3-0 AAC) on the other hand, shot 51 percent and had three players score at least 20 points. Ariadna Pujol led all scorers with 23 points and grabbed eight rebounds, while Maria Jespersen and Kitija Laksa both chipped in with 20 points each. Even though USF forced ECU into only 13 turnovers, the Bulls were efficient in converting them into 18 points. In contrast, the Pirates forced USF to commit 14 turnovers, but only scored eight points off of them.

The game started out looking promising for the Pirates, as they made 50 percent of their shots in the first quarter. USF built an early six-point lead after a pair of three-pointers from Laksa and Pujol, but ECU answered with a 10-5 run, punctuated by a Khadidja Toure three-pointer, her only points of the game. Thanks to the late run, the Pirates found themselves down only 15-14 at the end of the first.

USF began to pull away from ECU in the second quarter. The Bulls didn’t score during the first three minutes of the quarter, but once they got going they were hard to stop. Laksa did most of the heavy lifting for USF, scoring 11 of the team’s 20 second quarter points. ECU didn’t have an answer for her as Laksa hit jumper after jumper and capped a 9-4 run to end the half with a 3-pointer, pushing USF’s lead to 35-22.

The second half was more of the same as the Bulls increased their lead even more and the Pirates’ shooting percentage continued to plummet. The lone bright spot for ECU was the performance of Thais Oliveira in the fourth quarter. She grabbed six of her eight rebounds down the stretch, four of which were offensive rebounds.

"I think we got a lot from her [Oliveira] tonight that we can build on moving forward,” said Macy. “She sat for so long with an injury and she needs to play.”

After back-to-back road losses the Pirates return home to Minges Coliseum to face Central Florida Wednesday.