Temple Holds Off A Late Rally By Dayton Advances to A-10 Championship

By James Greenspan: SPM NJ Writer
Posted Sunday, March 9, 2008

PHILADELPHIA – In a hard fought exciting and physical basketball game, the Temple Owls fought off a late surge by the Dayton Flyers to advance to their fourth championship game in the last five years, and their 8th overall. Temple was led by Senior guard Ashley Morris who had a game high 14 points. She also contributed 7 assists and 6 rebounds for a solid overall day.

Both teams came out sharp in the first half and the game had a tense nervous energy about it as Dayton worked hard to stay with the talented Owl squad. Extremely hot shooting, as well as tough, hard-nosed defense helped Dayton to stick close throughout the first half and the frame came to an end tied at 28.

Throughout the first 8 minutes of the second half the teams remained tight, and with 12:40 remaining in the game, Dayton’s Kiki Lund sank a seemingly innocuous jumper to make the score 39-43 in favor of Temple. However, that would be the last field goal Dayton would score for 8 minutes and 6 seconds of game time. During that stretch the Owls went on a 9-0 run which put the game out of reach for the Flyers.

But Dayton was able to put together a mini-run and with Karah Cloxton sinking the free-throw on the back end of a 3 point play, the Flyers drew to within 4 points of Temple at 55-51 with exactly one minute remaining in the game. On this day, however, a Flyer comeback was not to be as Temple made their free-throws down the stretch and won the game by a final of 56-51.

Lady Comfort and Lindsay Kimmel also contributed to the Temple cause, scoring 10 and 12 points respectively. Comfort also added 11 rebounds for her 7th double-double of the season.

For the Flyers, Kiki Lund had 10 points off the bench to lead the team in scoring. The Flyers' leading scorer on the season, Nikki Oakland, was held to only 6 points. Discussing the possible end of her illustrious career at Dayton, Oakland said, “hopefully it’s not over, hopefully we can go to the post-season. I love this team, and I don’t my career to be over.” The Flyers are a long shot for the NCAA tournament, they would have to receive an at-large bid and they would likely be the A-10’s 4th team into the tournament, a scenario which is highly unlikely.

Temple takes on #3 seed Xavier in the Atlantic 10 Championship game on Monday at 5 pm on ESPN2.