Women’s basketball: UCI loses eighth straight

Amara Aguilar

The streak is alive. Not only that, it is thriving.

What started out as a bad road trip has turned into an eight-game

losing streak for the UC Irvine women’s basketball team.

The Anteaters (1-8) suffered their latest defeat at the hands of the

University of San Diego, 92-53, in a nonconference game at the Bren

Events Center Friday.

It is the longest single-season losing streak for UCI since the

1993-94 squad dropped 11 consecutive games.

“We just have to start from scratch,,” UCI Coach Mark Adams said. “We

did nothing right tonight, not one thing right. We didn’t handle the

basketball. We didn’t catch the basketball. We didn’t shoot the

basketball. We didn’t pass the basketball. We didn’t play defense.

Basically, I think our kids went on Christmas break a couple days ago.”

The Toreros were not exactly an easy team to beat. They extended their

winning streak to five and improved to 7-3.

The Anteaters took their only lead of the game when sophomore Kristen

Green made two free throws to make it 8-7 with 16:55 left in the first

half.

The Toreros took over from there, scoring 19 straight points to take a

26-8 lead with 10:43 left in the first half.

The Anteaters dug themselves a hole that was too deep to climb out of.

The hosts went on a 12-2 run toward the end of the first half, but it

hardly made a dent in San Diego’s charge.

The Toreros’ Kerri Nakamoto hit a three-pointer to help San Diego take

a comfortable 44-26 lead at halftime.

“We lost focus from the very start,” Adams said. “We weren’t doing

anything we worked on the last two days. We didn’t make the proper

switches early in the game on defense. We didn’t do anything that we

talked about in our game plan the last two days.”

The Anteaters continued their scoring drought in the second half. San

Diego scored the first seven points to take a 51-26 lead on a

three-pointer from Nakamoto with 17:30 remaining in the game.

The Toreros took their largest lead, 87-48, with 2:14 remaining. By the end of the game, they again led by 39 points.

The Anteaters made 35.1% of their field-goal attempts (20 of -57)

while the Toreros shot 59.6% (31 of 52).

San Diego also dominated from three-point range, making 12 of 19 while

UCI made only 1 of 9.

Cassidy Blaine made 5 of 8 three-pointers for the Toreros and had a

game-high 21 points.

“We practice on threes a lot because we know if we give it inside to

our posts, they are going to give it back out to us,” Blaine said. “Good

thing for us tonight, we were on.”

Green led the Anteaters with 12 points, followed by Chanda McLeod with

10. Senior Cindy Oparah had nine points and nine rebounds.

“We’re disappointed, obviously, that we lost, but we are not giving

up,” Oparah said. “I think with us, it’s a lot of mental stuff. It’s

really discouraging to be losing and losing and losing game after game.

We still believe we are a good team and we’ll pull this up.”

Oparah is one of six seniors Adams has looked to for leadership.

“Leadership has been a huge problem,” Adams said. “We have no

leadership on the floor. Quite frankly, I’m really disappointed in most

of my seniors with the exception of Cindy Oparah because this team is

supposed to have a senior nucleus that is supposed to lead this (squad).”