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Women's Basketball
vs Western Colorado (EXHIBITION)
Thursday, January 12
Salt Lake City
7:00 PM
University of Utah
43
vs
62
Stanford
Utah Falls to No. 4 Stanford, 62-43
1/12/2012 12:00 AM | Women's Basketball
Jan. 12, 2012
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - For 11 minutes Thursday night, Utah played the No. 4-ranked Stanford women even.
Then things changed in a hurry.
"We talked about it all week," Utes coach Anthony Levrets said. "They're going to have a couple of runs, but they have to be runs of three and four and five points, not runs of nine points."
Yet the Cardinal did just that, breaking way with a 19-5 run, including a stretch of nine straight points late in the first half, en route to a 62-43 Pac-12 victory.
"They're good enough that they're going to score in half-court," Levrets said. "You can't give them stuff on top of it."
But Stanford (14-1, 5-0) showed it is No. 4 for a reason.
"This is the standard. This is the bar. This is why you play," Levrets said. "This is what you want to be around here. It's what everybody wants to be, but this is what our hope is as we grow, that we get to be that, and it takes time."
The Utes have some good young players, but are not deep enough yet and were missing several Thursday because of injury. Point guard Janita Badon also played through a painful infection, which contributed to her 3-of-13 effort offensively.
Stanford's sister tandem also proved too much.
Nnemkadi Ogwumike started and ended Stanford's 19-5 first-half run. She finished with 18 points and 13 rebounds as Stanford extended its school-record 62nd straight win against a Pac-12 opponent.
Sister Chiney Ogwumike added 11 points and 14 rebounds and Toni Kokenis had 13 points for the Cardinal.
Stanford's length was a big factor.
"Our two bigs are big enough, but then our guards are just a little bit small and it's a little harder to get the ball inside," Levrets said. "But that's just battling and we got to continue to improve and get accustomed to it."
Iwalani Rodrigues scored 16 points to lead the Utes (8-7, 1-3). Taryn Wicijowski had 12 points and 11 rebounds.
"We have good young players and have to learn what it's like to compete at this level on a nightly basis and then improve (between games)," Levrets said.
Utah was coming off a 49-36 overtime victory at Washington on Saturday. Badon's heave with six seconds left forced overtime in that one and the Utes outscored the Huskies 17-4 in the extra period.
On Thursday, the Utes couldn't find the basket against Stanford's D, shooting just 28 percent from the field.
Utah entered with the Pac-12's top scoring defense -- limiting opponents to just 51.4 points per game while Stanford entered as the top scoring offense at 81.4 points per game.
"We didn't shoot the ball maybe as well as we're capable but we have excellent shooters on our team and I liked how our team battled, and rebounded," Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer said. "It's a great team effort. This is a really good group that is unselfish."
She said the defensive pressure made the difference.
"They were slowing it down, so we tried to push it more. Then we picked them up (pressed) and thought our team really responded. A lot of people really helped us."
Players Mentioned
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/ Women's Basketball
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