Bengal women trounce UMKC, push win streak to 3
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POCATELLO — The Bengals will end a 13-day court hiatus Friday when they travel to Northern Illinois to take on the Huskies.
They will enter that game in the midst of a three-game winning streak, after earning a decisive 67-50 road victory over the University of Missouri-Kansas City Kangaroos on Dec. 13.
“It was pretty tense there down the stretch, but I was really proud of how we stepped up and made some great plays and played really good defense in the fourth quarter,” head coach Seton Sobolewski said after the game.
Idaho State University (5-5) was paced by senior guard Maria Dias, who scored a game-high 26 points, to go with four rebounds, one assist, one block and two steals. She finished the game 8-of-10 from the free throw line, sealing the Bengals’ win with clutch shooting from the stripe down the stretch.
Four of the Bengals’ losses have come against top-notch competition, in Cal, BYU, San Diego State and 19th-ranked TCU. Their other loss came at the hands of Vermont, at the Cancun Challenge in Mexico.
Following their trip to Northern Illinois, ISU will prepare to open conference play, beginning with a home tilt against Northern Arizona on Jan. 2.
Led by the scoring of Dias (10.1 points per game), Halle Wright (10.8) and bench-scoring extraordinaire Tadia Jordan (5.7), the Bengals will look to open Big Sky play with a winning record. And things appear to look from there, with the pending return of Nika Lokica, who suffered an upper-leg injury during ISU’s Nov. 16 loss to BYU.
Lokica was leading the Bengals in scoring (10.3) at the time of her injury.
Idaho State won the Big Sky regular season conference title during the 2021-22 season but have finished in the bottom half of the standings table in each of the past two seasons.