Irish overcome slow start for win
By KATIE MCVOY
Associate Sports Editor
Your mom always said it's a bad idea to come home past your bedtime. But that advice might not have hit home for five Irish players until Saturday at tip-off as the Irish squeaked by Seton Hall 65-60.
A late-night Friday dinner sent five players, including four starters, to the hotel after curfew. Of Notre Dame's usual starting line-up of Alicia Ratay, Jackie Batteast, Le'Tania Severe, Amanda Barksdale and Ericka Haney, only Ratay was at the hotel when the 11 o'clock curfew rolled around. For that reason, only Ratay was on the court for the opening tip-off.
"They went to dinner next to the hotel and the service was really slow and they got back about twenty minutes after curfew," said head coach Muffet McGraw. "And that's a team rule — if you miss curfew, you don't start."
So three Notre Dame players got their first career starts. Junior Karen Swanson, who until recently had walk-on status, and freshmen Kelsey Wicks and Katy Flecky took the floor for tip-off. They joined Ratay and Allison Bustamante, who had only started once before Saturday's game, to face off against a team they defeated by 34 points at the Joyce just four weeks earlier. The result on Saturday was a little different.
The new starting line-up, radically different than any other combination this season, left the Irish a little shaken in the opening minutes of the game. Seton Hall had taken an early 9-2 lead before McGraw started checking in some of the usual starting line-up.
"[The change] did affect the team," McGraw said. "By the time they got in, we were down. We got down early."
However, Flecky, the freshman forward, kept the Irish in the game in those opening minutes, scoring the first seven points for a Notre Dame squad that had it's worst shooting game of the season, hitting only 32.1 percent of their shots from the field. Those seven points helped make up the nine that tied Flecky's career best. Flecky attributed some of that success to feeling in control of her game early on.
"It kind of felt a little like high school when I played my game the way I knew how," she said. "There have been a lot of chances, but it felt like before and I had a lot of confidence going in."
Those seven points set Batteast up to bring the game within one with a trey, before the Irish fell behind by 10 with eight minutes to go in the first half.
"We just couldn't put the ball in the basket and, really, that was our only problem," McGraw said. "Defensively we played pretty well. We just couldn't make a shot."
In the first 20 minutes of the game, the Irish shot 25 percent from the field. Fortunately, three of the 10 shots they made were three-pointers. Bustamante and Wicks made consecutive treys that allowed Wicks to tie the game with two free throws with four seconds left in the first half. A buzzer-beater by Seton Hall's Cecilia Lindqvist put the Pirates on top 28-25 at the half.
In the second half, the Irish managed to squeeze out a lead and, thanks to a tightly called game, bring home the win.
Batteast, who had only scored four points in the first half added another 17 points to claim her ninth double-double of the season with 21 points and 12 rebounds.
"I think she really settled in in the second half," McGraw said. "She was really the player we were looking for."
Although the Irish upped their shooting percentage to 40 in the second half, it was really foul shooting that allowed the victory. In a closely called game, the two teams together totaled 44 personal fouls.
"They called it really tight," McGraw said. "There were a lot of sticky spots. Just really some that we could have done without."
While there were some fouls the Irish could have done without, there were even more fouls that were imperative. Notre Dame scored 18 points on 24 trips to the free-throw line in the second half, enough to give them the win.
"We definitely won by free throws," Flecky said. "We're a pretty good free-throw shooting team and if you put us at the line, I think we can do a lot of damage and I think that was a determining factor."
The Irish took their first lead of the second half on a lay-up by Haney five minutes into the half and managed to hold onto it for most of that half. In the final minutes, Seton Hall guaranteed that it would not be overlooked, bringing the game within three before Batteast hit two foul shots to put the game away.
Notre Dame will have only a day of rest before the team takes to the road again to face Pittsburgh on Tuesday.
All Sports Stories for Monday, February 4, 2002
