The Boston University women’s basketball team will look to add another victory to its unprecedented 12-game winning streak when it takes the floor tonight against Binghamton University in Vestal, N.Y. at 7 p.m.
On Sunday afternoon, the Terriers (17-6, 11-0 America East) completed the season sweep of another conference foe, handing the University of New Hampshire a 75-53 smackdown.
Senior guard Kristi Dini led all scorers with 20 points, including a career-high-tying six 3-pointers. Senior co-captain Jesyka Burks-Wiley claimed her fifth America East Player of the Week award with her seventh double-double of the year (18 points, 11 rebounds).
The Terriers are ranked 32nd in the nation in steals per game and feature the conference leader in that category in senior guard Amarachi Umez-Eronini (2.7). They displayed their defensive prowess by completely shutting down UNH’s two best scorers, juniors Candace Williams (20.9 points per game) and Amy Simpson (14.6 ppg). They held Williams and Simpson to a combined 11 points.
The Bearcats (10-14, 5-6) have dropped their last two decisions, most recently a 62-51 defeat at the hands of Stony Brook University.
Binghamton leads America East in 3-point field goal percentage (.350) and boasts the reigning America East Rookie of the Week in freshman forward Viive Rebane.
Rebane is coming off of a 15-point, 15-rebound performance against the Seawolves. She ranks third on the team with 8.7 points per game this season, but is averaging 12.5 ppg in her last two games.
The Bearcats have another young, dangerous scoring threat in freshman Andrea Holmes. The 5-foot-6 guard leads the team in scoring with 10.4 ppg and is averaging over 13 ppg in conference play. Holmes has snatched America East Rookie of the Week honors three times this season.
BU, however, has four scorers who average more points than Binghamton’s leading scorer ‘-‘- Burks-Wiley (18.5 ppg), Dini (12.3 ppg), senior co-captain Christine Kinneary (11.2 ppg) and Umez-Eronini (10.9 ppg).’ ‘ ‘
The Terriers and Bearcats last met on Jan. 14 at Agganis Arena. BU came away with an 81-63 triumph.
BU’s co-captains, Burks-Wiley (22 points, 11 boards) and Kinneary (22 points), led the way offensively for the Terriers.
BU shot 45 percent from the field, 41 percent from beyond the arc and 78 percent from the free-throw line. They lead the league in field-goal percentage (.432) and free-throw percentage (.733), and rank second in 3-point shooting (.328)
Kinneary tore apart the Bearcats’ defense, which attempted to play her aggressively on the point. She took the ball to the rack all day long and capitalized on 10-of-11 from the charity stripe.
‘A lot of teams in the conference are going to try to pick me up full court, pressure me,’ Kinneary said after that game. ‘So I just spoke with coach, and I felt like if they were going to play up on me, I could really get to the basket.’
Yet another Terrier is on the verge of tearing down a program record. Burks-Wiley has already become the eighth player to reach 1,000 points and 500 rebounds in her career, and Kinneary has claimed the program record for assists. Dini needs just four 3-pointers to break the single-season record and she needs five of her signature trifectas to claim the program’s all-time record.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
