JCU, NDC women earn big victories

Falcons post fourth straight win

The Notre Dame College women’s basketball team tops West Virginia State. Meanwhile, John Carroll stops OAC rival Mount Union. David S. Glasier has the stories.

The Notre Dame College women’s basketball team has quality depth.

Depth is one of the reasons the Falcons this season are considered a toptier outfit in the tough Mountain East Conference.

That depth showed Dec. 5 in the Falcons’ 93-82 victory over West Virginia State at Murphy Gymnasium.

The Yellow Jackets did a commendable job bottling up NDC junior guard Saina Adachi, the fourthleading scorer in the MEC at 21.6 points a game and a Player of the Year candidate.

Adachi finished with 11 points while going 3-for-11 from the field.

It didn’t matter, because fellow junior guard Kyleigh Ramlow picked up her NDC teammate, and then some.

Ramlow netted a career-high 28 points, 23 in the second half, as the Falcons overcame a sluggish start to notch their fourth straight victory.

NDC upped its records to 6-2 overall and 4-1 in the MEC. The Falcons are hot on the heels of first-place Charleston (8-1, 5-0 MEC). The two teams square off Dec. 8 in West Virginia.

WVS slipped to 2-6 overall and 1-4 in the MEC.

Ramlow started the night averaging 10.4 points with a previous high this season on 18 points. The Toledo Swanton High School product blew by the latter number late in the third quarter en route top her most prolific offensive performance as a Falcon.

“They did a good job face-guarding our best scorer, but we’re pretty deep. This team is bigger than one person,” Ramlow said.

Ramow produced all those points in 18 extremely productive minutes. She was 11-of-18 overall from the field and 6-of11 from 3-point range.

The Falcons also got 12 points from junior guard Katie Karalic. Senior point guard Marisa Finazzo (Gilmour) added 10 points and seven assists in 15 minutes.

Neither team got much going on offensive in the first quarter. The Yellow Jackets came away with a 20-15 lead because they made two 3-pointers to none for the Falcons.

The second quarter produced nearly twice as many combined points..

Falling behind by 10 points three minutes deep into the second quarter, the Falcons rallied and chipped away at the deficit to trail at halftime, 5147. The shooting percentages in the quarter were a much more robust 56 percent for NDC and 50 percent for the Yellow Jackets.

The Falcons came out firing in tho third quarter. A 3-pointer by Ramlow at the 9:13 mark put NDC in front, 53-51. She cashed in two more treys as the Falcons extended their lead to 63-58.

NDC led by as many as eight points before the Yellow Jackets used a late push to narrow the Falcons’ lead to 73-70 after three quarters.