It took overtime to pull out a January victory in Goodland but Wednesday night at the Barton Gym, the Barton Community College women's basketball team busted open the game early behind fifteen straight points in rolling to a 102-58 win over Northwest Kansas Technical College.
Eclipsing the 100-point mark for the sixth time this season, Barton improves to 12-5 in the Jayhawk West to solidify its third place standing while improving to 19-7 overall. The Mavericks slide to 1-16 in conference play and 1-24 overall.
Barton's next contest is the regular season home finale for the Cougars, putting a five game win streak on the line against first place and No. 6 ranked Seward County Community College. The Saints have rolled to nineteen straight wins to sit tied atop the standings with Hutchinson at 17-1 and a glossy 25-2 overall record.
Following an exchange of buckets with Northwest taking a 4-2 lead, a 15-0 Barton run broke open the game with the Cougars putting the Mavericks in the rear view mirror the remaining thirty-three minutes.
A Taylor Regan jumper in the paint tied the contest for the final time at the 7:41 mark followed by Mallory Miller canning a trey with Jaylin Stapleton pumping in the next eight points including a pair of triples before finding Richelle Turney for a fast break layup exploding the lead to 17-4 with 3:03 remaining in the first frame.
Barton doubled up the Mavericks in the second quarter as Regan controlled the boards in the quarter grabbing five offensive rebounds to take seventeen boards to the locker room.
The Cougars widened the lead by another sixteen points in the third frame, expanding the lead to fifty-three points early in the fourth, going on to win by the largest margin of the six game series history.
All fifteen players played in the contest with eleven spending ten or more minutes on the court. Turney led all player production on the night coming off the bench to bury a career high 4-of-6 from behind the arc in coming up a point shy of a new best with twenty-four points on the scoresheet.
Stapleton's three treys and perfect six tosses from the charity strip contributed seventeen to go along with dishing out five dimes. Regan, who broke the school rebound mark three games ago, finished with nineteen and scored fourteen points in posting her 11th double-double of the season. Miller added twelve points including three treys with Taylor Nichols scoring eight points and grabbing half of her eight rebounds on the offensive glass helping the Cougars gain a twenty-four board advantage on the night.
Taylor Watkins' nineteen off the bench lead the Mavericks with Kiara Tharpe contributing eleven.
Defensively the Cougars held the Mavericks' two leading scorers to 3-of-21 shooting on the night with overall leader Josie Cook held to eight points below her average and N'Dea Flye, who leads the scoring category in conference play with over 22 points per game, held to just nine points with six coming from the charity stripe.