GREENSBORO – After a tough loss on Wednesday and heading into conference play next week, a runaway victory is just what the North Carolina A&T women's basketball team needed and got on Saturday afternoon, as the squad defeated Pfeiffer University 74-55 in the Corbett Sports Center.
All five of the Aggies wins have been by double figures.
Brown and Aprill McRae led the way for the Aggies (5-8) with 17 points apiece. Brown bounced back from a 2-for-12 shooting performance against VCU on Wednesday to shoot 3-for-6 from the 3-point arc. On a 41.5 percent shooting day, N.C. A&T capitalized on 34 Falcon turnovers, leading to 30 Aggie points. Senior guard Christina Carter dished out eight assists in the affair and for the first time since January 10, 2015, didn't commit a turnover. She also had a season-high five steals.
Carter leads the MEAC in assist-to-turnover ratio, and she is second in the league in assists. She is now third on the Aggies all-time assists list with 301.Fourth-year head coach Tarrell Robinson was cautiously optimistic about the win.
"We're excited about the win but we've got a lot of work to do," he said. "The 20 assists are exciting, I love it when we share the ball. But our confidence has to get better. We have to start really believing in the things we focus on in practice."
The Falcons took an early 8-6 advantage on a Safia Sheikh 3-pointer. The Aggies scored the next five points before another Sheikh 3-pointer tied the game at 11. But Quenswayla Story entered the game at the 6:23 mark of the first quarter and took a post from Kayla Green in the high post and scored on a jump shot just inside the free throw line to give the Aggies a 13-11. Story's jumper put the Aggies ahead for good. They led by as many as 21 in the first half and by 12 at halftime.
Pfeiffer dripped to 2-7 on the season. Sheikh led the Falcons with 15 points including 5-for-11 from the 3-point mark. For the second straight game N.C. A&T was out-rebounded by its opponent, with Pfeiffer holding a 39-34 edge.
"Our rebounding has got to get better,” said Robinson. "We got out-rebounded by Pfeiffer and we were considered the bigger team going into the game. So there's definitely a lot of good and bad to take from this game before we get ready to start conference play.”
N.C. A&T will head into its full conference slate starting 2 p.m., Saturday, January 9 at Savannah State. They are 1-1 in the league after a win over Howard on Dec. 5 and loss to Maryland Eastern Shore on Dec. 7.
"Building more continuity as far as our bench and starters and just getting ready for Savannah State is now our focus," said Robinson, who has finished second twice and third once in his three previous years as the head man at N.C. A&T. "We've played 13 games, 11 of them non-conference and we feel like we've been through our ups and downs and we're prepared to start conference play."
