In front of one of the largest crowds in program history, Wright State battled back from a 16-point deficit only to come up short against Dayton 79-76 Wednesday evening.
Wednesday’s crosstown showdown was between two squads coming off NCAA Tournament berths in the spring. The crowd of 1,583, the largest Nutter Center women’s basketball crowd in nearly a decade, tried to rally their respective teams as the crowd was evenly divided between Wright State and Dayton partisans.
“I thought it was a great environment and fun for the kids to play in the environment,” Dayton head coach Jim Jabir said. “I was really happy with the support we got. There was a lot of our fans here and that was great. I thought that helped us down the stretch.”
The Raiders trailed at one point 26-10 and were lifeless in the contest missing three of its their first 16 shots. And then Tay’ler Mingo put on a show scoring 17 points in the final 7:16 of the first half to put the Raiders within one at halftime.
“We just had to come together as a team,” Mingo said. “We had a game plan and we stuck to it from the beginning to end and it worked. We just missed a lot of shots. We only had one bucket the first six or seven minutes.”
Mingo scored a career high 32.
“To her credit, she played really hard, she competed and I think at times tried to do too much but nothing like in the selfish way,” Wright State head coach Mike Bradbury said. “
The Raiders took their only lead in the second half off of a Simone Denham jumper 43 seconds into the half. But that was as close as WSU would come to winning the contest.
In the end, it was Ally Malott who came up big for Dayton leading the Flyers with 18 points and 11 boards to lift UD to its third win of the year. She was among five Flyers in double figures.
Despite the loss, WSU head coach Mike Bradbury said this was ‘”by far” the Raiders’ best performance of the season.
“I wouldn’t call it a frustrating (loss), that was one of the top 25 teams in the country,” Bradbury said. “We were ahead, we didn’t just get close. We were ahead at one point in the second half. It is always disappointing when you lose a one-possession game.”
Wright State capped Atlantic 10 Preseason Player of the Year Andrea Hoover who was scoreless in the first half. Immediately after finally breaking through with five points, she committed her fourth foul. After playing less than a minute with four fouls, she committed a charge on WSU’s Taylor Stanton with 4:02 remaining to foul out.
Though she did not score the way she normally does, Hoover was still a factor in Wednesday’s game.
“We committed a lot of resources to guarding her, which allowed some other people to score more than they normally do,” Bradbury said. “That makes her a factor. We committed a lot of resources to keeping her down and we thought that was give us the best chance to win.”
Despite not being able to take the lead the final 18 minutes of the second half, Wright State kept Dayton within arms length for the entire second half. The game hung in the balance until the final 10 seconds when UD picked up an offensive rebound and scored on two free throws off of the rebound.
The Raiders return to action Friday at Butler.
