The St. John Fisher University Cardinals’ relentless march to the free-throw line proved to be a dagger for the Ithaca College women’s basketball team, as the Cardinals cashed in on 79% of their 34 attempts to secure a hard-fought 73-67 victory.
This loss breaks a six-game win streak over the Cardinals and drops the Bombers to 0-2 on the year, their worst start to a season since 2015. St. John Fisher moves to 3-3, looking for its fourth consecutive Empire 8 title.
The game started off fast with both teams exchanging turnovers. Senior forward Annabella Yorio picked up right where she left off, scoring the game’s first points on a tough layup assisted by junior guard Zoraida Icabalceta. Just two minutes into the game, head coach Dan Raymond called a timeout, visibly frustrated with the weak-side defense after it allowed Sidney Tomasso, a senior forward and reigning Empire 8 Player of the Year, to drain a three-pointer. While the timeout helped the Bombers jump to a 9-5 lead halfway through the first quarter, that was one of their only leads of the game. The shots went cold and the Cardinals would go on an 11-2 run, closing out the first quarter with a 16-11 lead.
The second quarter started the same way the first had ended: a St. John Fisher three-pointer and an Ithaca shooting foul. The floodgates opened and the refs decided to blow their whistles seemingly every possession. The Cardinals capitalized and made 16 of 19 first-half free throws while the Bombers shot only six.
The Bombers tried to play bully ball due to their height advantage, but the lack of outside shooting came back to bite them. Missing layups and sloppy defense allowed the Cardinals to pull away and jump out to a double-digit lead.
Leaders of the South Hill squad included sophomore forward Elizabeth Majka, who scored 11 of her 13 points in the first half, keeping the Bombers afloat with her beautiful backdoor cuts and gritty finishes. Senior forward Anya Watkins continued to dominate the glass with eight first-half rebounds, four of them on offense. While the Bombers outshot the Cardinals 35-22, they were not able to contain St. John Fisher’s two-headed monster in Tomasso and senior guard Katie Moravec, combining for an efficient 27 first-half points.
Ithaca went into halftime down 37-27, shooting around 31% from the field, and 0-6 from beyond the arc.
“We’ve got to be able to stop people,” Raymond said. “Defensively, we’re just asleep right now. We need to figure out what we can do better. That’s got to be the emphasis. We also need to find players willing to step up and contribute, as our guards aren’t providing us with what we need. All our scoring is coming from our post players.”
The halftime motivation didn’t seem to spark the energy the team needed to turn things around. The Bombers came out slow, missing a layup, turning the ball over twice and then allowing an easy bucket inside. Yorio decided enough is enough and scored the next 12 Bomber points, cutting the deficit down to six.
Right when the momentum looked like it was going to shift in Ithaca’s favor, a missed layup turned into an and-one for the Cardinals, which brought the Bombers’ deficit back down to six points. Icabalceta drew a charge and then sank the Bombers’ first three of the game, only to be matched by Tomasso’s corner three. Bombers’ graduate student guard Emma Waite joined the scoring, drilling a contested three-pointer on the wing. The teams went back and forth, exchanging punches, when St. John Fisher’s sophomore forward Danielle Seamon banked in a buzzer-beater three-pointer from way downtown.
The Bombers entered the last frame down 57-48, still eager to get into the win column.
A layup by Icabalceta was immediately countered with a Cardinal three-pointer, pushing the deficit back to 10 with eight minutes to play. The Bombers were getting good looks in the paint, but nothing to show for. Some fouls, some turnovers and some cold shooting put them in an 11-point hole with just four and a half minutes remaining. Yorio started to get it going, making the next two Bomber buckets, clawing them back within striking distance. Then Icabalceta hit her second three, narrowing the lead down to nine.
After a couple of late-game fouls against St. John Fisher, the Bombers were back down by 12. Waite started to find her stroke in the dwindling seconds of the game, knocking down two three-pointers, but ultimately, it was too little too late.
“We sent [St. John Fisher] to the line 34 times so we got to be able to defend better,” Raymond said. “We tried switching. We tried not switching. A lot of it just has to come down to our players, determining this is what we got to do.”
Yorio led Ithaca with 18 points followed by Majka’s 13. Watkins finished a rebound shy of a double-double with 10 points and nine boards.
The Bombers look to pick up their first win of the season against No. 23 SUNY New Paltz at 2 p.m. Nov. 23 in Ben Light Gymnasium.
