The women’s basketball team will focus on playing Kent State basketball for the full forty minutes against Temple University, Thursday at 7 p.m in the MAC Center.

“We talked a lot in practices, not even just this week, but the last two to three weeks about maintaining the focus for forty minutes,” head coach Danielle O’Banion said. “The first half of the last two games we’ve been relatively successful in shooting the basketball making shots, but now it’s making sure we’re coming out in the second half so we can get closer to forty minutes.”

The Flashes lost to Niagara Sunday afternoon after turning the ball over 25 times, which Niagara turned into 34 points.

Kent State continued to have multiple players in double digits scoring against Niagara with Trisha Krewson, Tamzin Barroilhet and Diamon Beckford.

“Anybody can score any night,” Beckford said. “You can say you know we have to stop Tamzin, well Trish might show up or if you have to stop me, Tamzin might show up or so and so along those lines. If we keep having multiple people scoring, we’ll be a harder team to guard.”

The Owls are traveling to Kent after back-to-back wins over Bowling Green and Syracuse. The Flashes played Temple a year ago at Temple and lost 68-33.

“We have to make sure we’re forcing Temple to run offense at half court on a short shot clock,” O’Banion said. “Meaning that we’ve got to cover up and help cover our post players who are at a slight size disadvantage, and that’s not anybody’s fault but we’ve got to make it a half court game on a short shot clock.”

Temple came back, after going into halftime with a 14-point deficit, to give Syracuse their first loss of the season. The Owls outscored the Orange 49 to 28 in the second half despite 23 turnovers.

Victoria Macaulay, the Owls’ center, had her fourth double-double this season after notching a game-high 20 points and 11 rebounds.

“She is absolutely a talent post player, and it’s a great opportunity for our team – not just our post players – to figure out a way to be disruptive with her,” O’Banion said. “We’ve got to make sure it’s difficult for her to touch the ball first of all. We’re going to limit her touches, and secondly when she does touch the basketball, [we’ll] make sure she isn’t comfortable. So it’s very simple basketball really.”

Macaulay ranks in the top five among all Atlantic-10 players in six categories. She averages 15.4 points per game (5th), 9.7 rebounds per game (3rd), 51.9 shot percentage (4th), 1.9 blocks per game (5th), 7.6 defensive rebounds per game (1st) and 34.9 minutes per game (5th).

Contact Erika Brun at [email protected].