Women's basketball stays at top of OUA
By Michal Tellos
Sports Editor
November 19, 2008
 The Lancers women’s basketball team got even more comfortable at the top of the OUA this weekend, as they rolled over the Toronto Varsity Blues and the Ryerson Rams to move up to 5-1 in the conference – the top of their division.
The Lancers faced Toronto on Friday night, and it was a blowout from the beginning. The girls outscored their opponents 25-11 in the first quarter and never looked back, never losing the lead, and never being outscored in a quarter.
The final score of the game was an embarrassing 87-55.
The women were led by Laura Mullins who had 15 points, and Alisa Wulff who recorded another double-double, scoring 13 and adding 12 rebounds.
Saturday was no different, as the Lancers quickly built up a substantial lead and never looked back.
They outscored the Rams 22-9 in the first quarter, and scored a whopping 31 points in the final frame to handily take the game 83-53.
In this game they were led by Emily Ross who had 13 points, and Alisa Wulff who was just one rebound shy of another double-double. Raelyn Prince also chipped in with eight points and eight rebounds.
Head Coach Chantal Vallee is extremely pleased with the weekend.
“I’m really happy about the weekend in general – it was a great weekend for us, a weekend where we saw offensive power in addition to strength at the same time. It was against teams that have won two and three games each in the league,” she said.
“So I think for us it was the first time we really displayed to our fans how well we played in the preseason, so I was pleased to be able to show our fans what we can do,” she added.
Throughout the weekend, the team showed off an efficient and aggressive yet clean style of defence, and this was something they had been working on. Fouls throughout the game, particularly in the paint, were kept to a minimum.
“We’ve been focusing on defence a lot, making sure that it was really, really cleaner, and it’s paid off and I’m very happy about it,” said Vallee.
The team will now not play any homes games until January, and they have four big road games coming up, starting with the Laurentian Voyageurs and York Lions this weekend.
Both of these games will be huge for the team as well as Vallee on a personal level.
“Laurentian is now first in the east, they were ranked nationally last week, so that’s going to be a great game for us. And York – so far I’ve only beat York once in my career here, so I want to make sure we go and get a second win,” said Vallee.
Zone play can be worked on, but other than that there is little to work on according to Vallee.
“I think things have been going well so far here, obviously. I think at the end of the game we have to try to practice our zone a little bit, and we need to improve that zone and use it against a lot of teams. So we’re going to stick to the same game plan and just clean up a lot of stuff,” she said.
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