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AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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Officials name senior vice president, chief of staff
By Fiona Riley, Assistant News Editor • March 26, 2024

Colonials drop sixth-straight with home loss

GW head Coach Mike Bozeman knows that the biggest hurdle facing his team isn’t something he can easily address in practice.

The Colonials dropped their sixth-straight game to Richmond Saturday, falling 68-55. GW (5-10, 0-1 Atlantic 10) faltered in the second half after coming out strong in the first. It’s a pattern of play the Colonials have exhibited frequently this season, evidence of the mental battle the team faces.

“In practice, you can just stop practice and see where the mistake was. You can’t do that now, in the game,” Bozeman said. “The improvement [the team needs] across the board is just [halting] the mental lapses when you’re playing against a team that plays the kind of schedule we play. You can’t have mental lapses like we’ve had.”

Junior forward Tara Booker agreed with her coach’s assessment.

“We need to just settle everything down, because a lot of the time, our team gets kind of frantic,” she said. “It’s like mental lapse after mental lapse, and once we break down it’s hard to get everyone back together and regroup.”

On paper, the Richmond-GW matchup was fairly even: Richmond made 23 field goals to GW’s 22, the Spiders grabbed only six more total rebounds than the Colonials, and the two teams were even in turnovers. The crucial difference that enabled the Spiders’ victory came in the second half, when the Colonials allowed Richmond a 21-0 run that turned a 40-36 GW lead into a 57-40 Spiders lead.

“I thought that we came out in the first half with the energy that’s necessary to be successful in this conference, the energy that’s necessary for us to be successful as a team,” Bozeman said. “And I think in the second half, their stars really shined.”

Spiders guards Abby Oliver and Brittani Shells were responsible for 47 of Richmond’s 68 points. Bozeman said his team headed into Saturday’s matchup with a defensive game plan to reduce Oliver and Shells’ effectiveness, but that the team’s practice didn’t pay off.

“Shells has been one of the top guards in our conference for the last couple years and has now busted onto the national scene,” Bozeman said. “We had, in practice, for hours and hours, gone over how we were going to defend them. We had probably five too many lapses on defense as relates to those two, and particularly Shells.”

Richmond was especially dominant from behind the three-point line, making 12 three-point baskets, six more than the Colonials. Booker hit four of the team’s six three-pointers Saturday afternoon and had a team-high 16 points to go with her nine rebounds.

The Colonials shot just 38.6 percent from the field Saturday, making it the fourth-straight game in which GW failed to shoot better than 40 percent. Only Booker and junior Sara Mostafa, who had 10 points, scored in double digits against Richmond.

The loss was not without a silver lining for Bozeman, who was heartened by his team’s improvements in both rebounding and free throw shooting. The Colonials shot just over 83 percent from the charity stripe against Richmond, 20 percent better than the team’s performance from the line in its last three games, and were competitive on the boards, which was especially pleasing to the GW head coach.

“We spent a lot of time on that,” Bozeman said postgame. “We did a great job in the Rutgers game rebounding and it carried over into today.”

As the Colonials continue into conference play, Bozeman said that even in the midst of a losing streak, he remained confident that his team was on the verge of success.

“We’ve taken steps forward, we just have to take more. We have to get better. GW is not accepting of what’s happening right now. I’m not accepting of it. Forget what GW is, I’m not accepting of that,” Bozeman said. “I’m very confident in that we’re so close, that Monday’s practice could get us over the hump.”

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