An explosive second half from the men lift them to an impressive early season victory.
The first weekend of the 2024-25 college basketball season has come to a close, and both the Washington State Cougar men’s and women’s teams were able to secure their second victories of the early season.
On Friday, the men hosted the Bradley Braves and came out with an impressive 91-74 win, outscoring the Braves 46-32 in the second half. The women traveled down to the Bay Area to try and finally upend their longtime nemesis, the Stanford Cardinal. WSU held tough, but ultimately Stanford proved to be too much to handle, pulling away in the fourth quarter to win 94-65. The Cougs rallied back on Sunday afternoon and beat the Idaho Vandals in part one of a two-day doubleheader, as the men will square off with the Vandals on Monday night.
It will take some time to adjust to a WSU team that appears capable of scoring at will. 191 points in their first two games is their highest mark since scoring 199 in the Los Angeles Classic to open the 1991-92 season. Bradley isn’t a pushover either. The Braves entered Friday night’s contest ranked 78th on KenPom and ranked in the top 64 defensively each of the past three seasons.
For the second straight game, six Cougs had double-digit points. Cedric Coward and Nate Calmese led the game with 18 points each. Dane Erikstrup tacked on 16, Ethan Price dropped 14, LeJuan Watts contributed 12, and Isaiah Watts came off the bench for 10.
Bradley was one of the top three-point shooting teams in the nation last season, hitting 37% of their three-point attempts, good for 22nd in the nation. The Braves showed off their shot-making ability early, hitting four of their first 10 treys. On the other side, WSU found offensive success in a number of ways. Price and Erikstrup both knocked down early three-pointers of their own, and Watts took two fastbreak buckets home to give WSU the lead they would never relinquish.
Price built on the lead with a personal 6-0 run before passing the torch to Calmese, who delivered his own trio of buckets with back-to-back-to-back and-ones.
The Braves sharpshooting kept the game close, shooting 7/16 from beyond the arc to make it a three-point game at the halftime whistle. WSU exploded out of the gates in the second half, with Erikstrup, Calmese, and Price each knocking down triples to give WSU a 12-point lead. Bradley interrupted WSU’s killshot opportunity with a single free throw, but WSU immediately responded with a 10-0 run to put this game in blowout territory, now leading by 21 just six and a half minutes into the second half.
WSU held firm from there, cruising the rest of the way in route to as impressive a victory as you could get early in this season.
Stanford has long haunted the WSU women’s program. Tara VanDerveer, in her 38 seasons at the helm, never lost to WSU. With her retirement, maybe, just maybe, this was finally the time WSU could finally take down the mighty Cardinal.
As has been the case in almost every game of this series, WSU had to chase the Cardinal early and just couldn’t catch up. An 11 and 10-point first half from Tara Wallack and Ele Villa kept the game respectable in the first half, but a 15-2 run in the final three minutes of the third quarter to put the Cardinal up 21 erased any hope WSU had of finally conquering Stanford.
Villa led the Cougs with 19 points on a very efficient 8/12 from the field and cashed three of her four three-point attempts.
The Cougars rebounded on Sunday by picking up a win over their cross-border rival Idaho Vandals 71-60. Wallack led the Cougars in both points (14) and rebounds (8).
Despite a dreadful 3/17 shooting from beyond the arc, WSU found their advantage in creating 22 Idaho turnovers, capitalizing for 17 points off the Vandal miscues. WSU led for all but 1:17 of game time when the Vandals took a 9-8 lead in the first quarter and again midway through the second quarter for 15 more seconds.
WSU made up for its misses from deep by hitting 22/28 from the charity stripe. Seven first quarter personal fouls from the Vandals put WSU at the stripe for eight shots, swishing six of them in the first 10 minutes.
The Cougars couldn’t separate themselves from the Vandals until after the halftime break. WSU finally broke away to begin the third with a 16-4 run to open the third frame behind a combined effort from Alex Covill, Astera Tuhina, Marta Alsina, Villa, and Wallack.
Idaho rallied in the fourth quarter to pull as close as seven, but the Cougs were able to fend off the Vandal comeback efforts at the free throw line. The Cougs hit 9/10 fourth quarter free throw shots to help keep the game out of reach and hang on for their second win of the young season.
