WSU women’s and men’s hoops teams rally from slow starts, win opening games

Both teams shook off the opening game rust to start 1-0.

College basketball kicked off on Monday with both Washington State Cougars women’s and men’s basketball teams grabbing victories at Beasley Coliseum.

The women opened the night with a thrilling 83-82 overtime victory over the Eastern Washington Eagles while the men closed with a 100-92 shootout win against the Portland State Vikings.

Despite both starting their season on the right foot, their games did anything but start right.

Beginning with the women’s team.

Kamie Ethridge’s squad struggled to find their groove from beyond the arc early, missing 10 of their 12 first half three-pointers and allowed the Eagles to haul in 11 offensive boards in the first 20 minutes. The Cougars early struggles allowed the Eagles to get out to a 12-point halftime lead and eventually balloon the lead out to a game-high 15 with 7:50 left in the third quarter.

Though if we’ve learned anything about Ethridge’s squad over these last six years, it’s their ability to battle through adversity. French freshman Charlotte Abraham found the bottom of the net on a three-pointer for her first collegiate points then followed it up with an and-one to cut the deficit to 11. Abraham proved to be just the spark that ignited the Cougar comeback as the Cougs went on a 21-5 run with Ele Villa, Jenna Villa and Tara Wallack all making contributions to turn an Eagle 15-point lead into a two-point Cougar lead.

The war for the lead continued deep into the fourth quarter with the game dwindling down to the final seconds. With WSU down a point, the freshman Abraham came up huge with a go-ahead trey with four seconds remaining to flip the lead back to WSU.

Down to their final shot, Eagles’ leading scorer Peyton Howard tied the game at the buzzer with a bucket inside to send the game to overtime.

As the teams continued to jockey for the lead, Ella Gallatin gave the Eagles a late two point lead with a three-pointer with 20 seconds to go.

This season is a bit of a change from what WSU has been used to over the past four seasons. They always knew who to get the ball to in these late game situations. Charlisse Leger-Walker isn’t here to play hero this season. Now in this new era of Cougar basketball, a new hero needs to emerge and what better way to find out than in the opening game of the season.

They turned to junior guard Astera Tuhina who’s no stranger to the big stage. In her freshman year, she came up with big defensive plays and bigger shots in the most important game in WSU basketball history, the Pac-12 Championship game.

And to kick off her junior year, she did it again. Tuhina side stepped her defender, found space and fired a three-pointer that found the bottom of the net. Ice cold. The Cardiac Cougs do it again.

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The men kicked off their season four later on the same floor and faced the same early game jitters that plagued the women.

The high-paced David Riley offense got off to a clunker of a start, turning the ball over eight times in the first 5:09 of the ballgame. The turnovers and red hot shooting start from the Vikings gave PSU an alarming 21-4 lead. One of the two remaining players from last years tournament team, Isaiah Watts came off the bench and proved to be just the spark WSU needed to wake up and get things rolling in the other direction. Watts three-pointer kicked off a WSU killshot as Dane Erikstrup back-to-back threes and suddenly the deficit was under double digits. The 10-0 killshot proved to be just a blimp in a larger, more dominant run by WSU to end the first half. Over the last 15 minutes of the first half, WSU walloped the Eagles to the tune of 42-17, flipping the once 17-point deficit, into an eight point lead.

At Eastern Washington, Cedric Coward led the Eagles in both points and rebounds. When Riley announced he was making the move south and coming to coach the Cougars in Pullman, one of the biggest questions was whether Coward would follow him to WSU and become their star after so much of WSU’s talented roster had left.

In his first game in the crimson and gray, he got off to a bit of a quiet start. Even when the Cougs went on their game changing run to end the first half, Coward only had four points to his name at halftime. In the second half, Coward made his presence known on the Palouse. The 6’6 senior showed off his sharpshooting with a trio of three-pointers and used his strength inside to bull through defenders. Coward finished with a game-high 23 points and 12 rebounds.

Though the Vikings were able to hang close, getting within two points, the Cougar offense was just too much for the Vikings to handle. After missing their first four three-point attempts to begin the game, the Cougars closed hitting 15 of their last 28 treys and hit 50% of their second half three-point attempts.

Six Cougs finished with double digit points as the Cougars dropped 100 points in their first game under David Riley, winning 100-92.