Cougars move into 1st in West with win over No. 9 Cloud County

Cougars move into 1st in West with win over No. 9 Cloud County
The Barton County Community College women's basketball team extracted a bit of payback Saturday night at the Barton Gym, knocking off 1 of the 2 teams that have beaten the Cougars this season. Barton, ranked No. 15, defeated No. 9 Cloud County, 73-61, to move into the top spot in the Jayhawk West. The Cougars have a 1/2 lead in the West but are actually tied in the loss column with Cloud, Seward County, and Hutchinson. Barton is 9-2 in the West and 23-2 overall. The other 3 teams are all 8-2 in the West. Cloud falls to 19-4 overall. Barton can remove Seward from the 2 loss list Wednesday and hand out a little more payback when the Saints come to the Barton Gym for West play. Seward is the only other team to have beaten the Cougars this season. Tip will be at 6 pm.

Highlights
Barton led nearly the entire contest against the Thunderbirds with only a brief exchange of leads to start the game. The Cougars took the lead for good just 4 1/2 minutes into the game when Ipek Turkyilmaz hit a layup on a nice feed from Inga Muciniece. That started a 9-0 run for a 14-6 lead and Barton never trailed again.

Not that Cloud didn't challenge the Cougars nearly the contest, though. Barton led briefly by double digits in the opening half (19-8 and again at 28-16) but the T-Birds, 74-55 winners over Barton in Concordia, would come back. After trailing by 12, Cloud went on a 13-2 run to cut the Barton lead to 30-29 late in the half. The Cougars would take a 32-29 lead to half despite being outrebounded 24-16.

Barton would hold a lead of 2-7 points for the 1st 10 minutes of the 2nd half. At that point, Barton began to stretch its lead out, reaching 10 points on a Muciniece bucket to give Barton a 57-47 lead with 7 1/2 minutes to play. The lead stayed around 10 the rest of the way. Barton turned that rebound deficit around in the 2nd half, outrebounding the T-Birds 26-19 – including 10 offensive boards. Barton recorded 14 2nd chance points off those 10 offensive rebounds after Cloud won the battle of 2nd chance points in the 1st half 8-2.

Turkyilmaz and Courtney Sturdivant each scored 18 to pace the Cougars with Kristine Silaraja adding 13. Muciniece put up big numbers for Barton with 11 points, 16 rebounds, 7 blocks and 4 assists. Turkyilmaz lead Barton with 6 assists and added 7 rebounds and 5 steals.

Barton can sweep the foes that swept them earlier this year with a win over Seward Wednesday. The Cougars lost a heart-breaking 68-67 decision at Liberal following the Cloud loss in Concordia. That game saw 18 lead changes with the final lead change with 0.7 seconds to play on a pair of Tegan Cunningham free throws to give the Saints the win.

Stats
Stats can be found at www.bartonccc.edu/sports

Next 
Wed Feb 13 – v Seward, 6 pm (Jayhawk West contest at the Barton Gym in Great Bend)