By BRITTANY OCHTINSKY

Senior Reporter

ROCHESTER — After getting knocked off by Oral Roberts in the Mid-Continent Conference Finals last season, Oakland University’s women’s basketball team finally got a chance at revenge last Saturday, when the Golden Grizzlies downed the Golden Eagles 71-57.

It wasn’t hard for coach Beckie Francis and captain Jessica Pike to get the team motivated coming into the game, given the history between the two teams. After coming off an 81-71 loss to Summit League opponent South Dakota State five days before, the Grizzlies ran an intense week of practice to prepare themselves, but were unusually quiet in the locker room heading into Saturday’s game.

“When a team takes you out of your goal and dream last year in March, you have a tendency to be extra pumped up when you face them the first time,” said Francis. “This is a game where we had no motivational speeches, it actually was quiet. It was more ‘Let’s calm ourselves down because we’re all so juiced up for this game.'”

Francis added that after her team comes off a disappointing loss, they get so mad about it that they see what they can learn from it and often go on a vicious win streak.

The Golden Eagles didn’t stand much of a chance, as the Grizzlies outplayed them in every aspect. The biggest lead Oral Roberts could muster was three points in the first five minutes of the game. Conversely, the Grizzlies held several leads by as many as 20 points and extending all the way up to 22 in the second half.

Pike led the Grizzlies with 18 points, Riikka Terava scored a career-high 12 points and April Kidd put up 11 against the Golden Eagles, while the Grizzlies’ defense held Janae Voelker and Mariane Camargo to 17 and 12 points, respectively.

“I knew right before the season I had to shoot more to help Pike and Hanna [Reising],” said the soft-spoken Terava.

And about getting her career-high against Oral Roberts: “It was perfect.”

The biggest difference, though, came in the depth of the two benches. Francis played eight players off her bench to Jerry Finkbeiner’s four.

“I told the team that our depth is going to be better than their depth. I haven’t seen a lot of their players on film, he doesn’t play a lot of his bench and he told me that before the game,” Francis said. “I went into this game, intentionally knowing that I’m going to go to the bench because we need to try matchups now. This was the game we were going to see who could stop who. We did that on purpose and they came in and delivered.”

Freshman Brittany Carnago had a perfect field goal percentage for the third time in four games, going 3-3, and Francis attributes her performance to why the team is doing so well.

Defensively, April Kidd and Reising did a “tremendous” job manning their players, as Reising held Jenny Hardin, the Summit League’s preseason player of the year, to 2-10 from the floor.

“We had great hedges on their screens, we were there and helped out when they drove, we were there and contested on the kick-outs and threes, so it was just all-around great team defense,” said Pike.