The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women's basketball team dropped its sixth consecutive game Sunday afternoon, falling 80-64 to Alabama at McKenzie Arena.
UTC (1-8), which travels to face Eastern Kentucky (2-4) at 11 a.m. Thursday for its next game, played the Southeastern Conference's Crimson Tide (8-2) evenly in the first half, with the score tied at 33 at intermission. The Mocs led 39-36 early in the third quarter before the visitors, spurred by their change to an aggressive zone defense, used a 25-4 run spanning the final two quarters to pull away.
Despite the loss, there were positives for UTC with six games remaining before tipping off Southern Conference play on Jan. 6 at Samford.
The Mocs had 13 assists and just 11 turnovers, only the second time this season they had more helpers than mistakes (Nov. 19 against Murray State was the other), and they did so against an Alabama team that had forced an average of 20.7 turnovers a game prior to Sunday. The 11 turnovers were a season low forced by Alabama and tied for a season low committed by the Mocs.
UTC junior forward Abbey Cornelius tied a career high with 22 points, adding 10 rebounds and four assists to lead the team in all three of those categories. She made all eight of her free throws. Amaria Pugh added 12 points and Dena Jarrells 11.
"We took a lot of steps forward today to be a better basketball team," UTC coach Katie Burrows said. "Their pressure just got to us in the third quarter, and it was too late for us to get out of it.
"In the first half, we were patient with our offense. We weren't forcing things, we weren't turning it over, so that's what we've been trying to focus on and we did that in the first half, but in the second half, we weren't turning it over but we were trying to do too much dribble-drive, 1-on-1 rather than getting it inside the zone with a pass or reversing it. We'll learn from that moving forward."
Alabama's leading scorer was JaMya Mingo-Young (26 points, 8-for-9 on free throws), who also had 11 rebounds. Khyla Wade-Warren had 11 points while going 4-for-5 from the field with six rebounds and two blocks, and Megan Abrams and Brittany Davis scored nine points apiece, with Davis grabbing a game-best four steals.
Compiled by Gene Henley. Contact him at ghenley@timesfreepress.com.