CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Coming off of its fifth loss of the year and its lowest scoring output of the season, Carson-Newman embarks on the first of three games in five days on Monday at 3 p.m. to face off with South Atlantic Conference club Queens at Curry Arena.
"I want to see our team score the ball better," Carson-Newman coach Mike Mincey said. "We didn't get into a flow offensively [on Saturday]. The ball was getting stuck. We weren't making the right reads. We didn't get the ball reversed, we didn't get the ball inside and we weren't making easy shots. They know we gave this one up at home. There is a lot of basketball ahead of us. We can still do all of the things we want to do. We have to play better on the offensive end."
The Orange and Blue have not dropped back-to-back regular-season games since Nov. 30 and Dec. 7, 2019 with losses to Wingate and at No. 16 Anderson. This year the team has rebounded from its first four losses with 53-point drubbing of USC Aiken, a 15-point toppling of Lenoir-Rhyne, a 28-point dismantling of UVA Wise and a seven-point road win at Lincoln Memorial.
Saturday is the 17th installment of C-N and Queens (6-12, 5-12) with the Lady Eagles winning each of the last 14, their longest current string against any SAC member, after dropping the first two of the series. Twelve of the 14 victories have been decided by double figures with the average margin of 25.
In the first meeting this year, the Orange and Blue scored 35 points in the third quarter blowing up a nine-point halftime lead to win 105-70, their highest scoring effort of the year. Braelyn Wykle (Greeneville, Tenn.) became the 28th player in program history to score 1,000 points posting a game-high 21 points.
Under Jen Brown, the Royals have flipped the script after losing 15 straight SAC games the team had a stretch where it went 5-5 against the league but the team has dropped five in a row, all of which have come by double figures while giving up at least 75 points in each affair and 90-plus three times.
Most of the team's issues are on the defensive end of the floor where the Royals allow the 19th-most points in the nation at 75 per game with six teams scoring at least 90. Ten units have shot at least 44 percent and four have hit 53 percent or better.
Only seven teams in Division II are worse on the glass with Queens getting outrebounded by an average of 11 per night, the worst rate in the SAC. An opponent has won the battle on the boards 16 times with coach Brown's crew getting outrebounded by double figures 11 times and a season-high 30 by Wingate on Dec. 15.
While the team is seventh in the league in scoring at 65 points per night, Kalaya Hall is the second-leading scorer in the SAC and 12th in the country with 21.3 points per game. The junior has been in double figures in all but one game and is posting an average of 28 in her last six, all of at least 20 points, shooting buoyed by a 43-point outburst on Jan. 24 against Limestone, the sixth-most all-time in SAC history. The guard had 15 points against C-N in the first meeting on 6-for-16 shooting.
Kristy Hamze is the only other player scoring more than seven points per game averaging a dozen including a 14-point day against the Lady Eagles on Nov. 20. Her last four games have been an uptick in production as well posting 16 per game including a season-high 21 against the Saints.
Broadcast coverage airs on the Eagle Sports Network starting at 1:45 for "The Appalachian Electric Cooperative Countdown to Tip-Off" on Mountain Sports 106.3 (WPFT-FM, Sevierville) with an audio stream available on cneagles.com/live free of charge.
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