Falcon women roll past Ball State (2-5-11)

In a record-setting game, Lauren Prochaska and her teammates gutted out a 61-46 Mid-American Conference
victory over Ball State Saturday afternoon in Anderson Arena. PHOTO GALLERY
Prochaska broke
the school-career scoring record, passing Jackie Motycka Mossing who scored 2,122 points from 1985-89.
Prochaska finished with a game-high 21 points and now has scored 2,127 in her career. “It was a special
day. You cannot call that a special day with our performance, but we found a way to win when we didn’t
play our best. That’s what good teams continue to do,” BG head coach Curt Miller said. The Falcons are
now 19-4 overall and 7-3 in the Mid-American Conference East.
Neither team played well at the start of the game, but Ball State was making layups and led by nine,
16-7, with 9:55 to play in the first half.
“We survived a stretch where we were down nine, but were clearly playing poorly enough to be down 20,”
Miller said. “We made just enough plays and had one good run where we stretched the lead out to have a
comfortable win.”
The key to the comeback was that the Falcons started to play better defense, stopped turning the ball
over, and also hit from the outside, closing the half on a 24-7 run to take a 31-23 lead into the break.
BG made all four of its first-half threes in the late run with Prochaska making two and Jen Uhl and
Tracy Pontius each making one. Prochaska scored 10 points in the run and Uhl had nine.
“It all starts on the defensive end,” Prochaska said. “They were just getting layup after layup. They
didn’t even need to make an outside shot. They were just getting easy layups.
“We had to start taking that away. When we did that and started to make them make outside shots, they
started missing and we were able to get into a rhythm offensively.”

The Falcons average 14 turnovers a game and had 11 in the first half.
“It wasn’t that we couldn’t execute, we were just turning the ball over,” Miller said.
The Falcons were able to adjust as Ball State started the game switching on BG’s ball-screen offense,
where most teams hedge the ball screen while staying with the same defensive assignment.
“It caught us off-guard,” Miller said about Ball State’s scheme. “It took us some time to gain our
composure and understand that for 48 hours we had a game plan that within minutes was out the window
because they changed their defensive approach for the first time, basically all year.
‘We didn’t make the adjustment as quickly as we would like. But when we, did we started to do better
things.”
The Falcons extended their halftime lead to 17 points, 46-29, on a Uhl 3-pointer with 13:05 left in the
game.
The Cardinals rallied, cutting BG’s lead to 10, 50-40, with 5:22 left.
Ball State was still within 11, 56-45, with 1:53 remaining. Hennegan then nailed a 3-pointer with 1:35
left and Chrissy Steffen hit two free throws with 17 seconds left to seal the win.
“We just need to start playing harder and start playing better as a team and then everything will be OK,”
Prochaska said.
Miller was pleased with the team defensive effort on Ball State’s Emily Maggert and Ty’Ronda Benning.
Maggert came into the game averaging 16.1 ppg and finished with three. Benning was averaging 13.1 ppg
and she scored nine.
“We gave up only one three (point shot) between them and held them to 12 points,” Miller said. “That’s
unheard of.”
In addition to Prochaska’s 21 points, Uhl finished with 14 points and 12 rebounds for her second
double-double of the season and fifth of her career.
“Jen Uhl had a great game. She came through with a big double-double,” Miller said
NOTES: Ball State is now 9-15 overall and 4-6 in the MAC … BG held a 41-32 rebounding edge with
Prochaska pulling down nine missed shots … The starters scored 57 of BG’s 61 points … While passing
Motycka on BG’s all-time list, Prochaska also moved into fifth-place on the MAC career scoring list …
The Falcons have a week off before playing at Eastern Michigan on Feb. 12 with tipoff at 2 p.m.