DULUTH, Minn. – The St. Olaf College women's basketball team set up a win-and-in scenario on the final day of the regular season with a 68-58 road victory over the College of St. Scholastica on Wednesday evening at Reif Gym.
With the score tied near the midpoint of the third quarter, St. Olaf (13-11, 10-11 MIAC) used a 10-0 run to take the lead for good and went on to complete a sweep of St. Scholastica (1-22, 1-20 MIAC) with the road win. The victory, coupled with Augsburg University's win over St. Catherine University, means that the winner of Saturday's matchup between the Oles and Wildcats in St. Paul will earn the No. 6 seed in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC) Playoffs.
Senior
Rachel Kelly paced St. Olaf with 16 points on 5-for-7 shooting from the field and 6-for-6 shooting at the free-throw line while pulling down nine rebounds in the win. The 16-point night moved the senior up to third in program history with 1,057 career points. Classmates
Grace Hegland and
Cassie Fix recorded 15 points apiece for the Oles, with Hegland adding 10 rebounds for her third double-double of the season.
Lexi Imdieke scored a game-high 21 points, including going 5-for-11 from three-point range, for St. Scholastica, while Megan Hurley registered 11 points and eight rebounds after knocking down all three of her three-pointers. The Saints made 11 three-pointers in the game, compared to three for the Oles, but St. Olaf enjoyed a 36-8 advantage in points in the paint.
After sophomore
Sarah Tangen opened the scoring with a three-pointer, St. Scholastica went on a 10-2 run that included two three-pointers by Imdieke to open up a 10-5 lead early on. The Saints led for nearly nine minutes in the opening quarter and were up by as many as eight before taking an 18-12 lead into the second.
St. Olaf shot 9-for-17 (52.9 percent) from the field in the second quarter to tie the game at 36-36 at the half. After trailing by 10 early in the quarter on another Imdieke three-pointer, the Oles went on an extended 20-6 run to grab a four-point lead inside the final two minutes of the quarter before eventually getting a jumper by Fix in the closing seconds to knot it up at the half.
With the game tied at 40-40 four minutes into the third quarter, St. Olaf went on the decisive 10-0 run to take the lead for good. Hegland capped the run with back-to-back layups off assists from junior
Cayden Botten. The Oles were 9-for-18 from the field in the quarter to take a six-point lead into the fourth.
In the fourth, St. Olaf held St. Scholastica to two points over the first 6:33 to take its largest lead of the night at 65-50 with an 11-2 start to the quarter and led by double figures the rest of the way. The Oles limited the Saints to 3-for-16 (18.8 percent) shooting over the final 10 minutes.
The opening tip-off for Saturday's win-and-you're-in matchup in St. Paul is set for 3 p.m. The Oles enter the final day one game behind the Wildcats, but a win would give St. Olaf the tiebreaker by virtue of a series sweep.
