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Women's Basketball
at Colorado State
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The University of Utah Athletics
Thursday, February 25
El Paso, TX
6:00 PM
University of Utah
54
at
44
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UTEP
Women's Basketball Defeats the UTEP Miners
6/21/1999 12:00 AM | Women's Basketball
February 28, 1999
EL PASO, Texas - The Utah Utes guaranteed themselves at least a share of the Western Athletic Conference Pacific Division title with a hard-fought, 54-44 win over the UTEP Miners on Thursday night at the Don Haskins Center.
With New Mexico's 68-60 win over BYU on Thursday night in Albuquerque, The Lobos (11-2 WAC) stayed just a game behind the Utes (21-4, 12-1 WAC) in the Pacific Division. The Lobos host the Utes at The Pit on Saturday night. A Utah win would give the Utes the division title outright. A UNM win would allow the Lobos to tie the Utes for its first-ever WAC regular-season title.
Erin Gibbons paced the Utes with 17 points, connecting on 2-of-8 three-pointers, in 36 minutes. Lori Red had 14 points, going 5-for-11 from the floor. She also had seven rebounds and two blocked shots in 36 minutes.
Junior Center Kristi Rose equaled Sandy Kovach's blocked shots mark at Utah, getting two rejections to bring her career total to 124. Rose also contributed eight points and eight rebounds.
Utah built a 13-point lead on two occasions early in the second half and led 39-32 with 15:29 to play in the game before going scoreless the next seven and a half minutes. UTEP drew even at 39 with 9:54 remaining before Erin Gibbons made two free throws with eight minutes left and a jumper 35 seconds later to put the Utes back up 43-39. Gibbons also made 3-of-4 free throws in the final 49 seconds as Utah put the game away.
Utah outshot UTEP 37.0 to 28.6 percent from the field and made 16-of-26 free throws (61.5%), while the Miners attempted just seven free throws, making seven. The Utes dominated the boards 43 to 33 and limited UTEP's top scorer, Kristi Lattin, to one point, well below her average of 14.8 points a game.
"It wasn't real pretty, but the main thing is that we won," said Ute head coach Elaine Elliott. "We had a long drought there were we just didn't have anything going offensively. We were lacking leadership. We didn't really have any consistency and we weren't really playing hard at either end of the floor. But, even when they came at us, we never lost our composure and we kept with it. We did an nice job on the boards and held down their interior players. We focused on stopping them, and thankfully their perimeter players didn't hurt us with three-pointers."
The Utes were playing without point guard Tiana Fuertes, who went back home to Honolulu because of a death in the family. She is expected to meet the team in Albuquerque on Saturday.
"We lacked her presence and enthusiasm," said Elliott. "She is the emotional leader of this team. This is a tired team right now, but I just hope we can keep it going for a few more weeks."
It is the fifth consecutive year Utah has won a WAC championship of some form and the third consecutive year the Utes have won at least a piece of a conference divisional title.
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