[SLIDESHOW] Cats combine offense, defense to clobber RedHawks 107-53

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By Nick Craddock

Defense has been the calling card for the UK women’s basketball team thus far this season, but the Cats pulled an ace out of the hole on Tuesday night.

The Cats coupled their usual defensive intensity with a scorching offensive performance on their way to lambasting Miami of Ohio 107-53 in front of 4,123 fans who left Memorial Coliseum grinning from ear to ear.

“We just played some terrific basketball,” said UK head coach Matthew Mitchell. “The defensive intensity in the first half was where we want it, and we finally got on track tonight shooting the 3-point shot, which I thought was coming on.”

The Cats forced the RedHawks into 28 turnovers and shot a staggering 70.6 percent from 3-point range.

More importantly for UK, it was two usually solid 3-point shooters, junior guard Carly Morrow and senior guard Amani Franklin, who shook their offensive dry spell that has plagued them to start the season.

Morrow was 4 of 6 from beyond the arc for the game, while Franklin was a perfect 2 for 2 on her way to finishing with 16 points and nine boards.

“For the most part we were connecting on all cylinders,” Franklin said.

Franklin said aside from a period of play midway through the second half, where UK let up on the gas a little bit, nothing went wrong.

Nothing went right for Miami of Ohio, who finished with a poor 26.8 percent shooting percentage from the floor. Even the RedHawks’ star freshman guard Courtney Osborn, who came into the contest averaging almost 20 points per game, was rendered virtually ineffective. Osborn finished with 22 points, but made only 5 of 19 field goals.

In fact, the Cats really only needed the first half to decide the outcome, as they used a 15-0 and 12-0 scoring run to take a commanding 57-21 lead at the break.

The Cats opened the second half with a 9-2 run, and the crowd could sense nothing was going to go wrong for the home team when Franklin launched a 3-point shot three minutes into the half and it bounced around several times before falling through the hoop.

The effective 3-point shooting also helped alleviate some of the pressure on UK’s top scorer Victoria Dunlap, who collected her 17th career double-double.

“We really wanted to come out in the second half and keep our intensity level,” Mitchell said. “I was glad, after not doing that at first, that we managed to finish strong.”