It’s not often you see a team that shoots 35.4 percent from the floor win a basketball game, and it’s even rarer to see a team shoot that poorly and win by 24 points.
But that’s exactly what happened Wednesday night as the Timberwolves of Northwood University stormed into the Fieldhouse Arena and thumped the hometown Grand Valley State University Lakers 63-39 in the quarterfinal round of the GLIAC tournament.
“It’s very disappointing since we were very prepared coming into this game,” said Janel Burgess, GVSU head coach. “We did not fight through adversity and were not physical enough on the low post, whatsoever.”
The Lakers scored their lowest amount of points on the season behind a deplorable 19.7 percent from the field. They converted on only 12 of 61 shots for the game, and were held to just one point for the first 11 minutes of the second half, off of a free throw, before sophomore guard Brittany Taylor made a layup with nine minutes remaining.
GVSU trailed Northwood in just about every statistical category, expect for rebounds, where the two sides tied at 43. The Lakers limited Northwood’s Pam Wilson, the GLIAC leading scorer, to just 11 points on the night as she only hit one shot of 12 from the field. But Wilson’s 11 was more than any Laker collected on the night. Sophomore guards and twin sisters Brittany and Briauna Taylor led the Lakers with nine points apiece.
Despite the loss on Wednesday night, the Lakers likely will play in the NCAA Division II National Tournament still, as GVSU will find itself somewhere in the middle of the pack with Michigan Tech, the No. 1 Midwest regional seed, hosting the tournament. The winner of that region will go on to the NCAA Elite 8 with a shot at the title.
The Lakers know that they cannot afford to repeat Wednesday nights result to be successful in the national tournament. Senior Elizabeth Van Tiflin said that the team will refocus over the next week or so leading up to their first game in the Midwest regional.
“We’re fighters and won’t give up,” Van Tiflin said. “We’ll go back to practice tomorrow and practice with that extra grittiness and extra hustle that we’re made of and get it back.”
Junior guard Jasmine Padin gave Northwood credit for their emotion and hard work in the upset win, and said the Lakers need to get back to playing with the passion their opponent showed on Wednesday night.
“Today we flat out got outhustled,” Padin said. “They had all of the emotion and we acted like we didn’t even want to be out there. We need to have that dog mentality that we had in the beginning of the season. “
“We can’t pick and choose which games we want to play and which games we’re not going to play,” she added. “With the tournament it’s one and done, so we have to come back to practice and go back to square one.”
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