Jan. 6, 2011

Final Stats | Postgame Comments

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - Paige Mintun scored 14 points to lead four players in double figures on Thursday night as the UC Davis women's basketball team earned a hard-fought 63-55 Big West Conference matchup over UC Santa Barbara at The Thunderdome.

The Aggies won their second straight game, improving to 12-3 overall and 2-1 in the league. UCSB, which was led by 17 points from guard Adrian Kelsey, had its records evened up at 7-7 overall and 1-1 in the Big West. Mekia Valentine had 18 rebounds to go with eight points for the Gauchos.

Vicky Deely had three first-half treys and finished with 11 points for UC Davis while Samantha Meggison and Heidi Heintz - who scored the 1,000th point of her collegiate career - each had 10. Emilie Johnson added 12 points for the Gauchos.

The Aggies also had just eight turnovers in the game - UCSB finished with 23 - giving them only 14 over their last two contests. They scored 22 points off the Gauchos' miscues.

"I was actually really pleased with this victory because I thought it was a really hard-fought victory," said UC Davis coach Sandy Simpson. "I thought Santa Barbara played well, I thought that we had to fight for everything that we got tonight."

UC Davis, which trailed by as many as five points in the first half, led just 30-28 at the break but used a 7-0 run over a four-minute portion of the second half to forge a 44-34 with 10 minutes, 39 seconds remaining. A layup from Mintun and a corner trey from Meggison pushed the lead to 51-36 three minutes later.

UC Davis maintained a double-digit lead for most of the next six minutes and used good defense to not let the Gauchos get closer than six points despite being held to just five points for the last four minutes.

The first half had three ties over the first 12 mintues with the Gauchos enjoying their biggest lead at 17-12 midway. However, a 5-0 run by UC Davis helped give it a 24-19 after the game's final tie before it went into the break with its two-point lead. UCSB shot 69.2 percent from the field (9 for 13) over the first 12 minutes of the game but the Aggies countered by going 4 for 8 from beyond the arc, two of them coming from Deely.

"They came out shooting the ball well early and I was a little concerned that we would have to switch up defenses a little bit more often," Simpson said. "I thought we played very well defensively from about the 15-minute mark of the first half until about the last three or four minutes of the game. I thought that was the difference."

Valentine's rebounds helped the Gauchos finish with a 42-26 advantage in that department while Mintun had a team-high seven for UC Davis, jumping her over 500 for her career. Heintz's career scoring, which is now at 1,002 points, included 505 points during two seasons at San Francisco from 2006-08.

UC Davis, ranked 10th in this week's CollegeInsider.com Mid-Major Top 25 poll, will continues its Central Coast roadtrip on Saturday when it visits Cal Poly for a 4 p.m. game.