SU women top SWAC favorite Lady Panthers

• By PERRYN KEYS
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Jan 6, 2009 - Page: 1C - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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So maybe this wasn’t the championship game of the Southwestern Athletic Conference Tournament.

And maybe the Southern women’s basketball team still has 16 regular-season games to go.

But Monday night at the F.G. Clark Activity Center, the Jaguars made a little statement to the rest of the league: They’re young, they’re here, and they plan on winning more than a few games.

SU got a career-high 16 points from Hannah Kador and held off a hearty second-half charge from the league’s preseason favorite, Prairie View, to post a 63-58 win.

Southern (5-5, 2-0 SWAC) won the first round between these two conference heavyweights. The teams won’t meet again until the regular-season final March 7 — and as SU coach Sandy Pugh said, plenty can happen over the next 16 games.

Still, this was a big one.

“This was a battling-type game,” said SU forward Jamie Floyd, who added six points and seven rebounds. “We wanted to be energized from the beginning.”

The Panthers (4-10, 1-1) had won three of the last four meetings between these teams — and in their conference opener Saturday, they had defeated Alcorn State by 44 points.

But SU stood up to the challenge Monday.

Simply put, the Jaguars got it done with strong defense and high energy, even if the game itself wasn’t always pretty.

The Jaguars got ahead early, took a five-point lead into halftime and built a 14-point lead early in the second half.

Then they withstood runs of 9-0 and 13-4 as Prairie View pulled to within three points in the closing minutes.

“It’s hard when you have a team coming back on you like that,” Floyd said. “The main thing is (that) you have to play defense.
Defense won this basketball game for us.”