ALL-OUT ROUT
Buffs post 95 points in regular season finale vs. California
So much for that Stanford hangover.
Less than 48 hours after a heartbreaking double-overtime defeat against the perennial power Cardinal, the Colorado women’s basketball team put together one of its most complete performances of the season.
Aaronette Vonleh scored a career-high 25 points to lead the 21st-ranked Buffaloes to a 95-69 rout of California on Saturday at the CU Events Center in the regular season finale.
CU (22-7, 13-5 Pac-12) secured the No. 3 seed for next week’s Pac-12 Tournament, the best conference finish for the program since 2004.
“That is a great way to end the regular season, absolutely,” CU head coach JR Payne said. “Really proud of how we played, particularly in the second half. First half wasn’t too pretty, but I just said in the locker room great teams figure out a way to fix it. It wasn’t our best effort in the first half, but I thought we dug in and played really, really good basketball in the second half. Great team effort tonight.”
The 26-point difference was the third-largest margin of victory for CU in a conference game in the past 20 seasons. The Buffs hit the 90-point mark for the first time since a 96-70 win against Denver on Dec. 12, 2019.
In addition to Vonleh, the Buffs got 19 points from Frida Formann and 16 from Jaylyn Sherrod. Overall, the Buffs shot 55.2% from the floor, had a season-high 23 assists and their second-lowest turnover total (nine) of the season.
“I feel like that’s our expectation every day,” Sherrod said. “I think that today, we just did a good job and locking in and executing. Me and coach J were talking (Friday) and we’re like, ‘We’re a really dangerous team.’ I know Stanford, it was heartbreaking, but I think that opened all of our eyes on the team to be like, ‘Yeah, we can be really good.’ So I think that was just the mentality we took from that game and just applying it for now.”
CU was seconds away from knocking off the Cardinal in the
first overtime on Thursday before Stanford pulled away in the second overtime. Rather than dwell on that tough defeat, the Buffs got back to business against Cal.
“Honestly the turnaround is so quick, you don’t really have that much time to dwell on it,” Vonleh said. “I think we did a good job (Friday) just coming into practice focused on Cal and ourselves and what we need to do to get better and keep being successful.”
Vonleh scored CU’S first six points of the game and finished 11-of-14 from the floor.
“I was just kind of, like, (ticked) off after our last loss,” she said. “So just trying to like channel that into my energy today to