CHICAGO – The Roosevelt women's basketball team cut a 17-point deficit down to three in the final seconds against St. Ambrose, but the Lakers could not complete the rally in a 73-68 loss at the Lillian and Larry Goodman Center on Sunday afternoon.
Casey Davis scored 12 of her team-high 16 points in the second half for the Lakers (12-4), who saw their three-game winning streak snapped. Maria Tamburrino and Tori Clark added 11 points apiece for Roosevelt.
Lauren Cash tallied a game-high 21 for the Queen Bees (12-2), who won their seventh straight game.
St. Ambrose started fast, outscoring the Lakers 15-4 in the contest's first five minutes. The Bees built up a 17-point lead on multiple occasions in the first half, with Roosevelt making just 10 of its 33 attempts from the field in the opening 20 minutes, to take a 43-26 advantage into the locker room at halftime.
The visitors would answer each time Roosevelt made a run, but the hosts had one last gasp that cut their deficit to single digits. Trailing by 10 with 2:53 on the clock, Clark made a layup and hit a three off a St. Ambrose turnover in a 16-second span to trim the margin to five.
St. Ambrose answered to go back up six, but a pair of Erin McCaslin free throws and one of two at the line from Davis cut the deficit down to four with 28 seconds left. Cash made one of two at the line herself to get the lead to five, but Davis sank a basket with 12 seconds left in making it a 71-68 contest.
Forced to foul, Roosevelt sent St. Ambrose's Katie Schuler to the charity stripe, and she hit both with 10 seconds in regulation to make a comeback attempt difficult. The Lakers were unable to get a final shot off, falling for the first time at the Goodman Center.
"You can't play 34 minutes as poorly as we did and expect to win," said Roosevelt head coach Robyn Scherr-Wells. "Yes, it was a great six minutes to close the game and give us a shot at it, but if we would have just started playing that way even a few minutes before that, we probably could have come out of here with a win.
"Just shooting that poorly, turning the ball over too much, playing very tentatively on offense, really we were just a step slow," Scherr-Wells said. "It was kind of like we were still on vacation. You just can't do that against a good team like St. Ambrose that knows how to win. We needed a better offensive showing in the first half than we got."
Roosevelt begins the 2013 calendar year portion of its schedule by hosting CCAC rival Judson at the Goodman Center this Thursday, Jan. 3 at 5:30 p.m.
