Albany State women drop second straight

ALBANY — For the Albany State Lady Rams basketball team, it was a disappointing weekend.

They ended the SIAC/Peach Belt Challenge with a 63-44 loss to Columbus State University Sunday evening at the ASU HPER Gym. The loss puts them at 0-2 on the season and head coach Robert Skinner said there was very few positives to take from the past two games.

“I didn’t see any,” he said. “I didn’t see anything we can take and build from. We averaged about 32 turnovers this weekend, got out-rebounded in pretty much all our games … I just didn’t see anything positive at all.”

The first half of the game started much like their 20-point loss to Georgia Southwestern on Saturday. The Lady Rams started with a 5-0 lead but went through a four minute scoring drought, during which Columbus State went on a 9-0 run to take the lead.

ASU won the battle of the boards — 25-18 — in the first half, but they committed 18 turnovers again and shot just 26.9 percent from the field and 1-for-11 from behind the arc. Once again, the poor shooting of their opponent kept the game within reach, and they went into halftime down 30-18.

The Lady Rams showed promise in the second half, fighting their way back and cutting the lead to four with 13:49 left. ASU then forced a turnover on the next possession and Artisha Holston’s layup made it 35-32.

“We didn’t do anything spectacular, it was what they probably didn’t do,” Skinner said about his team’s second half run. “They made a couple of mistakes offensively and allowed us to get some easy baskets. In the process of doing it, we were cutting into the lead. We did a little bit better job executing offensively and defensively [in the second half], we just couldn’t sustain it.”

Columbus State’s Michelle Mitchell helped spark the Lady Cougars with a 6-0 run of her own with about 8:30 left to make it 45-37, and it snowballed from there. The Lady Rams would never get the lead back down to single digits.

The Lady Rams shot 57.1 percent in the second half, which Skinner said was aided by their full court press on defense.

“That probably helped us speed the game up and made us a little more versatile on offense,” he said.

Still, the Lady Rams were outrebounded 23-16 in the second half and Holston was once again the lone double-digit scorer for Albany State. She finished with 10 points and 19 rebounds.

The Lady Rams head to Florida Tuesday to take on Florida Institute of Technology at 7 p.m.