I listened to the UTEP
Miner Women play on Friday (1-26-18) and Sunday (1-28-18). I admit that I wasn’t paying a lot of
attention to either game while they were on.
It occurred to me that what I really wanted was to be watching these
games so I could see more of Katarina
Zec. I’d run into Coach Kevin Baker’s show earlier in the
week on the radio, which I did enjoy listening to. He seems like a really nice, upbeat fellow,
which contrasts with the usual coaching duties of yelling at the players and
the refs. There was also an interview
with an assistant coach (didn’t get her name), who had an amazing pedigree in
education.
I was working Friday night and was pretty busy. The ladies were in Houston playing Rice, a good team in C-USA.
It sounded like a really good crowd there. A reportedly good-size contingent of UTEP fans
were in attendance. Scoring was low to
begin with. Katarina got most of her
scoring early, but cooled off later. The
rest of the team wasn’t doing well either.
Tamara Seda was big presence
on defense and UTEP went down big when she was out for foul trouble. It was 29-15 Rice at the half. The Miners had overcome 15-point deficits
twice this season, but it wasn’t to be today with the final, 56-42 Rice.
Sunday, I had the NHL
All-Star game on TV, but had the Miners on the radio. I hadn’t seen that All-Star game in a few
years, since it’s been on cable. I
didn’t realize they’d radically changed the format. I guess I didn’t like it, since I kept
flipping channels. The Pro Bowl was on at the same time. That was poor scheduling on the NHL’s part,
though the Pro Bowl is even less interesting.
I ended up mostly watching a Mexican sports/soccer highlight/talk show
with Ivette Hernandez, who made the
show highly engaging.
The Miners were playing the North Texas Mean Green in Denton.
(No matter how dissatisfied I get with the El Paso Chihuahuas’ name, I’m always comforted by the much worse
team names out there.) They were playing
in arena nicknamed “The Super Pit.” Duke
Keith, calling the game, was downright offended by the name, I guess in
comparison to “The Pit” in
Albuquerque (which they’ve attempted to rename into something corporate, but
it’s not going to stick).
Katarina again scored early.
That was apparently all I wrote down, other than the 34-29 UTEP halftime
score. Ivette is very distracting. Actually, though the game was fairly close,
it just wasn’t very interesting as neither team was scoring much. The fourth quarter took this to an
extreme. It was 44-41 at the start of
the quarter. Katarina made a three,
which was the only field goal for the Miners for 10 minutes! That’s right, they only made one shot from
the field in this quarter. They flat out
didn’t score at all for the last two minutes.
The only good news was that the Mean Green weren’t much better. The final was 50-48 Miners. That’s 13
combined points for the quarter.
With the score that close, regardless of the offensive
futility, it was pretty dramatic at end.
The Mean Green (I’m grimacing typing that) had nine seconds with the
last shot and were only down one point, but missed. They fouled Jordan Alexander on the rebound with less than a second left. She missed the first free throw, but made the
second. For the last play, the Greenies
heaved the ball at mid-court and hit the rim.
Game over.
Wait! Nobody touched
the ball afterward. Should the clock
still have time on it? Who has
possession? Finally, the refs ruled that
hitting the rim started the possession and ended that game. Whew.
Coach Baker, after meeting with a multitude of friends and fans there,
said in the post-game interview that Jordan was supposed to miss that second
free throw, because the other team touching it would have ended the game. So, six points in the quarter and one of them
was an accident. Well, this game turned
out to be interesting after all.
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