Photo by Noah Clooten
DEVILS LAKE — Lake Region State College women’s basketball ran into the top team in the conference on Sunday.
The Royals (14-15, 7-6), playing their last home game of the regular season, took a 98-64 loss to Bismarck State College (21-6, 11-2) at the Devils Lake Sports Center. The Mystics rode 20 three-pointers to spoil the Royals’ Sophomore Day.
“We knew coming in that we had to defend the three-point line, and we just didn’t do it today,” LRSC head coach Colden Hutton said.
It was the fourth straight loss for LRSC.
“We’ve gotta come together and get past this losing streak,” Hutton said.
Nicole Lillard led the Royals with 24 points and seven rebounds. Lara Graham added 10 points off the bench. But Harys Beauchamp put up 28 for BSC, while Aleah McPherson had 20 and Caton Pearcy had 14. The Mystics outrebounded the Royals 54-31.
It was all Mystics from the beginning, when they opened the game with back-to-back threes.
Threes by LRSC’s Sydney Schwabe and Kiara Holweger kept the Royals within a 13-9 margin, but BSC grew its lead with an 11-0 run.
Matters only got worse in the second quarter as the Mystics outscored the Royals 21-6 over a stretch. They totaled nine three-pointers in the first half and led 48-23 at halftime. Beauchamp had 18 points for BSC, and McPherson had 14. The Mystics outrebounded the Royals a whopping 34-19 in the half.
Lillard led the Royals with 10 first-half points after hitting the team’s third triple.
The Mystics added some peskiness to their game in the paint to only add fuel to the fire of their three-point shooting as the game wore on.
“A lot of it, we were just closing out with hands down on things,” Hutton said. “And then not willing to put in the extra work, and that’s on us.”
Arden Faulkner was charged with her fourth foul at 7:58 in the third quarter. That limited an already short-staffed LRSC team to just six active players for most of the quarter.
The Mystics hit five more threes in the third quarter, helping run their lead up to 77-37. The Royals finished the period on an 8-0 run, which extended into 12-0 in the fourth quarter. Graham came off the bench to score seven points in the third quarter, while Lillard had nine in the quarter.
BSC made another six triples in the fourth quarter and nearly reached triple digits. With 20.9 seconds left and at 98 points, they were at the free throw line but missed both shots.
The Royals started to gel offensively, but it was too little, too late. Jenna Tierney, who’d scored just one point through the first three quarters, put up nine in the fourth quarter. Graham also hit her second three to finish with 10 points overall.
It was still a 98-64 loss in the end.
“The things that we were doing when we were 5-2 in conference, we’ve gotten away from that a little bit,” Hutton said. “And so we’ve gotta refocus on that, especially the outworking part. When teams outwork us, they beat us.”
The Royals conclude their regular season Monday on the road against United Tribes Technical College (15-12, 8-5) before returning to Devils Lake for a home playoff game next Sunday.
“It’s a team that, yes, they’re ahead of us in the standings still,” Hutton said. “And so we’ve gotta come out ready to go and be able to defend their post-ups… We’ve just gotta go out and outwork them.”
