Bailee Barber

Box Score

Kiara Etheridge scored 17 points against LCU.

Lubbock Christian LCU 19-10

St. Mary's STMU 21-7

Lubbock Christian LCU

19-10

Final

Mar. 04, 2017

St. Mary's STMU

21-7

Score By Periods
Team	1	2	3	4	F
Lubbock Christian LCU	21	15	18	16	70
St. Mary's STMU	9	14	16	12	51

Game Recap: Women's Basketball | 3/4/2017 5:23:00 PM | RattlerAthletics.com

LCU eliminates @StMUWBB in Heartland Tournament semifinals

By Chad Peters | St. Mary's Athletics Communications

TULSA, Oklahoma — Head coach Jason Martens prides St. Mary's Basketball being easily defined by defense leading to offense.

For a stretch late in the second quarter and into the third quarter Saturday, Martens' Rattlers couldn't have executed St. Mary's Basketball any more perfectly.

But for too much of the rest of the game, No. 3 seed Lubbock Christian took away the Rattlers' calling card en route to defeating No. 2-seeded StMU 70-51 in the semifinals of the Heartland Conference Championships.

"That's St. Mary's Basketball — it speaks for itself," said senior guard LaBraile Fields, the Heartland Conference Defensive Player of the Year, of a promising stretch in the third quarter that saw the Rattlers turn a 36-23 halftime deficit into a five-point hole in the opening minutes of the second half.

"But we couldn't get over the hump," Fields added, "because they were making shots. They keep it calm. They didn't react like we wanted them to to our run. They called timeout and got back flowing."

Kiara Etheridge led the Rattlers (21-7) with 17 points and three assists, and tied for the team lead in rebounding (five) and steals (two) in defeat. The game was symbolic of the kind of career the senior from San Antonio has compiled in her four years as a Rattler, during which she has become the only player in school history with 1,000 points and 1,000 rebounds with 1,363 points and 1,020 rebounds in her career.

What she doesn't yet know is if her Rattler career is over.

Though the Rattlers were eliminated from the Heartland tournament, they remain hopeful that their body of work on the season will earn them an at-large bid into the NCAA Tournament. They will learn their fate during Sunday evening's NCAA selection show.

"That's a scary feeling, especially as a senior," said Etheridge, the all-time leading rebounder in the history of St. Mary's and the Heartland Conference. "This might be our last game. You don't want it to be."

St. Mary's sliced the one-time double-digit deficit to five, 36-31, with a feverish start to the second half that included back-to-back 3-pointers from Fields and Arysia Porter, followed by a breakaway layup from Porter, who was later named to the All-Tournament Team.

But the defending-national-champion Chaps (19-10) answered back, and opened up a 22-point lead by the four-minute mark of the fourth quarter for their largest lead of the game.

While LCU never seemed to lose its shooting touch, the Rattlers struggled to find theirs throughout.

StMU shot just 32.8 percent from the floor, including 4 of 21 from 3-point range.

Though the Rattlers forced LCU into 17 turnovers while turning it over just 11 times themselves, the shots ultimately just wouldn't fall for the Snakes on the offensive end.

Fields finished with eight points, as did Tyra Cormier, who tied for the team lead in rebounds with five. Tia Mason and Alexia Torres added three points apiece off the bench.

"It was a tough game for us offensively," Martens said. "We talked about it coming in that we were going to have to hit some shots. We had some looks, they just didn't fall for us."

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