Winthrop women’s basketball starts fast, but loses 2nd straight conference game at home

The Winthrop women’s basketball team lost to Presbyterian 59-43 Wednesday night as the Eagles fell to 1-2 in conference play.

Winthrop took a 15-8 lead midway through the first quarter after a 13-0 run.

However, from that moment, it was all Presbyterian, which closed the quarter on an 11-0 run and outscored the Eagles 40-28 over the final three frames.

Presbyterian made 12 of 20 3-point attempts.

“I thought we came in locked in, but it wasn’t good enough,” Winthrop coach Semeka Randall Lay said. “We let (Presbyterian’s) go-to players, obviously, hit some key shots for them. I thought Presbyterian, give them credit, played in great rhythm. We started off hot, moving the ball around and sharing it, but then we went away from sharing the basketball, and I think that’s what made our offense a little stagnant. We just had to rely heavily on our defense.”

Junior guard Ronaltha Marc led the Eagles with 13 points in the loss, while forward Marissa Gasaway put up eight points, eight rebounds and three steals.

The defeat comes after Winthrop’s 52-51 loss to USC Upstate in the Eagles’ conference home opener on Jan. 6.

Winthrop opened up that game on a 14-5 scoring run and had an eight-point lead with 8 minutes left in the game before Upstate pulled off the comeback thanks to some late free throws.

“Well, number one, we’ve got to respect all of our opponents,” Randall Lay said. “These are good teams, and we just got to find a way to win and find a way to get all in sync and on the same page.”

Winthrop isn’t even a quarter of the way through its conference schedule, so there’s still a lot of time for the Eagles to stack up some wins and improve their standing.

But there are some things Randall Lay would like to see fixed first before her and her team head into their next game.

“I think it has a lot to do sometimes with how we practice,” she said. “And this had been our case. And we’ve got to fix that and correct it and try to get better at it. We’ve got time. There’s nothing to panic, but we do have to get better at that stuff.”

Winthrop (7-9, 1-2) will play its next game on the road at Radford on Jan. 13. The game starts at 2p.m.