The Barton Community College women's basketball team held off a fourth quarter charge Saturday night at the Barton Gym to prevail 76-69 over Colby Community College.
The Cougars currently sit alone in third place of the Jayhawk West, improving to 6-3 and 13-5 on the year while Colby slides to 3-7 in league play and 8-10 overall. Barton's next action comes Wednesday in Goodland for a 6:30 p.m. (CT) tip-off at Northwest Kansas Technical College.
Richelle Turney came off the bench to lead all scorers with a career twenty-five points with eight coming in the first period helping Barton to a two point margin. The Trojans rattled off five straight to open the second frame but Turney's three pointer to stop the run kick started a 16-2 stretch over the next five minutes to blow it open at 32-21. Fatou Ndao also contributed six of her nine points in that span following Turney's trey in giving Barton the lead for good converting an old fashioned three point play for a 22-19 lead with 7:20 to play.
Barton's fourteen point halftime lead grew to as much as twenty late in the third as Turney's two consecutive buckets put the score at 57-37 with under a minute left.
The Trojans quickly cut the deficit down to eleven in the first two and half minutes of the final frame before making things interesting in later slicing the margin to single digits. Jaylin Stapleton's big three-pointer with 1:53 remaining answered the Trojans' trey to push the lead back out to eleven before sinking three of four charity tosses in the final minute to hold off the charge as Colby got as close as six with twenty-six seconds left.
Stapleton finished with nineteen points in the contest in converting 10-of-14 from the stripe and dishing out six dimes. Taylor Regan's seventh double-double of the year provided eleven points and eleven rebounds, four coming on the offensive glass. Irene Chukwudi matched Ndao's five rebounds, to go along with four blocks and one steal.
Like the Cougars, the Trojans were led by a player off the bench as Jordan Nixon buried 3-of-4 behind the arc on the way to a team high nineteen points. Kaitlyn Guillory matched Nixon's shooting from long range to add eighteen points and a team high nine rebounds. Sia Williams scored eleven and Michaela Bethel added ten to round out the double-digit scorers.