It was a perfect storm that just wouldn’t stop hammering down on the UCLA women’s basketball team.
It started with Notre Dame (8-0) running out to transition basket after transition basket as the Fighting Irish left the Bruins following in the dust.
And when a barrage of 3-pointers came raining down on UCLA (3-5), the Bruins had no chance to weather the storm.
When the game finally came to an end Saturday afternoon, UCLA looked up at the scoreboard to find itself on the wrong end of a 90-48 blowout at the hands of No. 4 Notre Dame.
“They’re a top-five team in the country; that’s what happened in the game,” said coach Cori Close. “You have to play a pretty much perfect game to your identity, to what makes you play best, to have a chance to upset a team like Notre Dame on their home court.”
The game started well for the Bruins as they took an 8-6 lead off sixth-year senior Atonye Nyingifa’s jumper five minutes into the game. But then the winds picked up, and the layup line began for the Fighting Irish.
Fifteen minutes later, Notre Dame took a 44-20 lead into halftime. Despite the score, the Bruins had shown some fight, battling the Fighting Irish to an almost even rebounding performance in the first half.
But in the second half, it seemed like the Bruins left that fight in the locker room, getting out-rebounded by 11 in the final 20 minutes of play.
“Our defense couldn’t really stop the transition game, inside, outside, they were hitting everything in transition,” Nyingifa said. “After halftime our defense didn’t come out and chip away at the lead, but it gave them an even bigger lead.”
Notre Dame had UCLA outmatched at every point in the game, out-shooting the Bruins 56.3 percent to 28 percent from the field and hit 10-17 from three to the Bruins’ 3-14.
Notre Dame’s bench outscored UCLA’s 46-0, including a 21-point outburst from junior guard Madison Cable. She hit 5-6 from three-point land, including threes on three straight possessions.
“Our bench has been through a lot, and we don’t play with the same group of people in practice any two days in a row as we try to get through injuries,” Close said. “But the reality is our bench has to play their roles at a higher level.”
Nyingifa led UCLA with 19 points and 10 rebounds, seven of them coming on the offensive end. She didn’t get much help aside from senior guard Thea Lemberger, who scored 17 points.
As the two seniors on the team, they have taken on the responsibility of guiding the Bruins through the adversity early in the season.
“A lot of the responsibility lies on Atonye’s and mine’s shoulders, to get the team together,” Lemberger said. “That’s one thing we really can take care of immediately is playing better as an unit, working on our cohesiveness, playing better on both ends of the floor.”