The Women's basketball team spotted Drexel two points and ran off fifteen straight to set the tone for a 63-52 win over Drexel in the Championship game of the Toledo Glass City Tournament on Sunday afternoon. Nova reached the tournament final with a resounding 87-53 thumping of Mississipi Valley State on Saturday, canning a school record tying 18 treys.
After all of the Saturday threes, Sunday's quick start was fueled by a decision to push the ball inside early, with Emilly Leer getting four lane scores and immediately getting Drexel's big in foul trouble. With Drexel trying to fill the lane, the outside shots opened up and threes were deposited by Kendall Burton, Kavaunaa Edwards, Devon Kane, Lauren Burford, Caroline Coyer and 2 by Katherine Coyer. At the 5:40 mark, two free throws from Katherine Coyer pushed the Nova lead out to 31-10 for their largest lead of the game.
From that point forward, Drexel seemed to gain their footing and slowly chipped away at the Nova lead. It was 35-19 at half-time, but looking unlikely that Drexel would be able to mount a comeback. The second half started with Nova continuing to try to get the ball into the lane, with much less scoring success, but still managing to pick up some fouls, getting Drexel in the bonus with over 13 minutes to play. Drexel managed to cover the outside pretty well, and no more threes were going up uncontested. Unfortunately, the free throw shooting was not good so Drexel continued to eat into the huge Wildcat lead.
Drexel finally got inside of 10 points at the 10:40 mark and made a run to cut it to six with 8:30 to go and seemed to have all the momentum going their way. A huge long three from the top of the key by Leer stopped the bleeding there, and after a Drexel three neutilized that to get it back to a six point game, the Nova defense stiffened and Caroline Coyer took control, first with a drive and beautiful dish to Jordan Dilliard for a layup, a driving layup and then two foul shots off another drive, all helping to keep Drexel at bay. The game got real sloppy at that point with a lot of missed shots and fouls, ending with an 11 point Nova win. After starting out 7 of 12 on threes, Nova only made 1 of 9 the rest of the way. Leer finished with 18 points, the Coyer twins had 12 each and Devon Kane added 9.
Devon Kane made the all tournament team along with Emily Leer who was awarded the MVP award. A good start to the season for the women, jumping out to large early leads in both games and hitting 26 three pointers, with limited turnovers and fouls in each game. The foul shooting needs to improve. The three freshman are getting valuable court time and doing well. Kavaunaa Edwards got two starts in fornt of her family in her hometown area and was impressive, especially on the defensive boards in the opening half of each game. We seemed to be getting all of the rebounds and loose balls this weekend until the second half of the Drexel game. Getting Taylor Holeman back for the Lehigh game should take some pressure off of the front line.
