The Pepperdine men’s and women’s basketball teams will each face squads from Santa Clara in the opening rounds of this week’s men’s and women’s West Coast Conference Championships in Las Vegas.
The Waves women’s squad, 9-19 this season and the women’s tournament’s eighth seed, will play the ninth-seeded Santa Clara women’s team on Thursday, while the Waves men’s team, 5-25 this season, will play Santa Clara’s men’s team on Friday at 8 p.m. Pepperdine is the 10-team conference tourney’s 10th seed and Santa Clara is seeded seventh.
Pepperdine’s women’s team suffered two defeats the final week of the regular season. The Waves were beaten, 82-58, by Portland on Feb. 24 and 82-75 by Saint Mary’s on Feb. 22.
Paige Fecske, a junior guard, led the Waves with some hot shooting against Portland. She hit 10-16 shots to score 24 points. Her hottest shooting came in the second half. Pepperdine was down, 48-22, at halftime, then in the third quarter Fecske scored 11 of the Waves’ 22 points; however, Portland still led, 70-43, at the beginning of the fourth quarter and went on to win the game.
Junior forward Yasmine Robinson-Bacote scored 11 points and had four rebounds for Pepperdine, and sophomore center Megan House had six points and four rebounds.
Fecske also led the Waves in scoring against Saint Mary’s. She had 17 points, including three three-pointers, in the loss, and Robinson-Bacote had 16 points. Fecske also had six assists and Robinson-Bacote had the same number in rebounds.
Kim Jacobs, a senior guard, and Rose Pflug, a freshman guard, each scored 14 points for Pepperdine.
Robinson-Bacote hit scoring milestone in the Saint Mary’s contest. She became the 23rd player in Pepperdine women’s hoops history to score more than 1,000 career points. Heading into the WCC tournament, Robinson-Bacote has notched 1,018 points in her three college hoops seasons.
The men’s squad ended the regular season on a winning note. The team beat Portland, 75-64, on Feb. 24, 11 days after the university announced that coach Marty Wilson would not be retained for an eighth season and the search for a new coach for next season had commenced.
Sophomore Kameron Edwards led Pepperdine with 22 points and nine rebounds. The point total was the most points the forward had scored since missing nine games in the middle of the season due to a concussion and the most he had tallied in a conference contest.
Edwards, who knocked down three threes, got cooking early in the contest. He scored nine points in the game’s first few minutes as Pepperdine jumped out to an 11-0 lead. Edwards wasn’t the only Wave that got going offensively. Darnell Dunn, a junior forward, scored seven of his 13 points during another stretch in the first half that Pepperdine outscored Portland, 11-0, and grabbed a 36-12 lead.
Portland etched closer to the Waves in the second half, but never took the lead. Other scorers for Pepperdine were freshman guard Trae Berhow, who scored 14 points and corralled five rebounds, and sophomore guard Knox Hellums who scored 10 points. Dunn also snagged a career-high 10 rebounds.
Pepperdine fell, 75-61, to 22nd-ranked Saint Mary’s two days before beating Portland. Berhow and Hellums each scored 13 points to lead the squad. Edwards had nine points and nine rebounds, and Dunn scored eight points.
However, Pepperdine couldn’t overcome the 20-point halftime lead Saint Mary’s built by knocking down nine threes in the first half.
