Andrew Holtan | The Brookings Register
SIOUX FALLS – The South Dakota State women never trailed on Thursday afternoon and the Jackrabbits beat Kansas City 75-61 in the quarterfinals of the Summit League Tournament at the Denny Sanford PREMIER Center.
Despite never giving up the lead, the No. 2 seeded Jacks were outplayed by the seventh-seeded Roos in the fourth quarter. SDSU led by 21 points entering the fourth and was outscored 24-17 in the final 10 minutes. Jackrabbit head coach Aaron Johnston said he liked the way his team played at points during the game, but he didn’t think his team had the right mindset in the fourth.
“I thought we played really well in stretches. In the first half, I thought we played great defensively. We were on point, locked in. Second half, early on, we were pretty good. … [In the fourth quarter] we just lost a little bit of our edge, and you can see that,” Johnston said.
SDSU was dominant defensively in the first half. The Jacks led 17-5 at the end of the first quarter and went on a 15-1 run during the first 10 minutes. They held the Roos to 2-of-16 shooting from the field in the first quarter.
The Jacks stretched the lead to 23-7 with 6:28 left in the first half and then Kansas City scored four-straight points. SDSU would then score seven points in-a-row and eventually take a 32-15 lead into halftime.
Johnston said he thought the Jacks kept everything in front of them defensively in the first half and then they let the Roos get by them and to the rim in the final two quarters.
“In the first half I thought we just kept a really good position,” Johnston said. “Everything was in front of us. We didn’t really get our hips turned where they got downhill and got clean looks. Everything was in front of us defensively. Individually we also collected it. In the second half we saw a lot of clean runs just right to the rim and we were chasing and we just didn’t do a good enough job of staying in front of them.”
It was 37-24 when the Jacks went on a 7-0 run to go up 17 with 6:27 to go in the third. Kansas City answered with six-straight but then SDSU pushed the lead to 49-30 with five points of its own. The Jacks led 58-37 going into the fourth.
It was 66-43 with 6:21 to go when the Roos went on a 17-5 run to make it 71-60 with two minutes to play. The Jacks then put the game away with a lay up from Brooklyn Meyer and two free throws from Madison Mathiowetz.
Meyer said the end of the game left a bit of a bad taste in her and her teammates’ mouths and they want to clean some stuff up as they go into the semifinals on Saturday.
“We talked about it in the locker room. You know, when we’re locked in and we’re focused on our plan, we play well, and you saw that a lot in the first half. So I feel like going into Saturday, [we] always want to get better, and we’re going to take the things that we thought we could do better at and just keep moving forward,” Meyer said.
Meyer made history during Thursday’s game. She scored 26 points and in the process of doing so became the third Jackrabbit to eclipse 2,000 points in her career and broke the single-season SDSU scoring record with 688 and counting.
Meyer’s senior counterpart, Madison Mathiowetz, scored 18 points and had six rebounds and four assists. Redshirt sophomore Hilary Behrens and true freshman Hadley Thul each had nine points.
This was the first Summit League Tournament game for Thul and Behrens started for the first time in the conference tournament. Meanwhile, this was the seventh game in Sioux Falls that Mathiowetz has started and she said it’s important for younger players to get that first tournament game under your belt.
“I think that getting your feet here and being in this environment with just a huge crowd of incredible fans and realizing that there’s going to be a lot of outside noise, but learning to drown that out and just play. Looking to your teammates and to your coaches and focusing on the things that matter is really big in this tournament. I think this first game will do a really good job of helping us and the rest of our team make sure we get the rest in the right direction,” Mathiowetz said.
SDSU improved to 42-5 in the Summit League Tournament. The Jacks will play in the semifinals for the 17th time in the past 18 seasons on Saturday and they’ll take on the winner of No. 3 seeded South Dakota and No. 6 seeded Denver at 2:30 p.m.
Johnston said during the off day he wants to make sure that his team focuses on the positives and don’t let the way they played in the final quarter carry over to Saturday.
“[I want to] just reinforce those positives to our team and make sure they look at it [Thursday’s game] as a collective and not necessarily the last eight minutes, which wasn’t maybe where we would like to be,” Johnston said.
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