“Alright, how much are you guys going to pay me to tell you what my halftime speech was?”
Coach Lindsay Gottlieb was joking, but if you had a tape of the speech, you could probably sell it for a fortune because of the results it produced.
After a downright nauseating first half, UCSB’s women’s basketball team came out of the locker room and ripped visiting Cal Poly (9-7, 2-3) to shreds, bouncing back from a 16-point deficit to win by 10, 55-45.
“She didn’t rip us, she really just challenged us, especially the seniors, to step up and lead.” said senior Jenna Green. “Our energy had to change.”
In response, Sha’Rae Gibbons played the entire second half with the energy of a nuclear reactor, scoring 11 points and snatching four steals to spark the comeback. Green, meanwhile, came out and scored 12 of her game-high 16 points in the second half.
The Gauchos (10-6, 5-0) went 4-for-21 from the floor in the first half and turned the ball over 11 times. They trailed 29-13 with 31 ticks left thanks to a trey by Cal Poly’s Ashlee Stewart, but got four free throws before the intermission to cut the Mustang lead to 29-17.
“We were only down 12, and you’d think with a performance like that we’d be down 30,” said Gottlieb.
But she remained relatively calm at the half, knowing it was up to her players to come out and play a different game.
Gibbons never lost confidence.
“When we were running into the locker room at the half I just kept saying ‘we’re not gonna lose this game, there’s no way we’re losing this game’,” she said. “I have so much confidence in our team, especially with the leadership we have… I had the same amount of confidence in the first half that I did in the second half.”
Green scored six points and Gibbons added a big-time swish from beyond the arc to put together a 9-0 run out of the gates, getting the crowd to its feet and back in the game.
Gibbons swished another from the top of the key to cut the Mustang lead to 32-29 with 14:30 remaining, and Lauren Pederson fed Ashlee Brown for a basket in the post to tie it up at 34-34 at the 13:09 mark.
Gibbons would soon grab a steal for an easy lay-up to give the Gauchos their first lead, 36-34.
Franey grabbed five of her seven rebounds in the second half and finished 7-for-8 from the charity stripe. In all, the Gauchos kept up their free-throw mastery with a 22-for-28 performance on the day.
Pederson had an abysmal two field goals on 12 attempts, but one of those field goals was a textbook example of the old “follow your shot” mantra.
With 8:20 left, she bricked a jumper from the elbow that bounced off the back iron but somehow got to the rebound on the other side of the key before anyone else, putting it in for a lay-up to give UCSB a 40-38 lead that they would preserve the rest of the way.
It was the most up-and-down game yet in Gottlieb’s young Gaucho career, to be sure.
“At the 15-minute mark or something like that, Elizabeth Downing, our team doctor, was sitting right there at the table and I said ‘how do people do this for 20 years? This is tough!'” she recalled.
As Gibbons wisely pointed out, everyone comes after the conference champs with a little extra, so there are bound to be many more games like it ahead.
Gaucho fans can only hope she has more halftime speeches up her sleeve.
