The Ferris State women’s bas­ket­ball team won two of its three games return­ing to con­fer­ence play over the weekend.

The Bulldogs defeated Lake Superior State at home on Thursday by the slimmest of margins.

Sophomore Kelsey DeNoyelles hit a pair of free throws with 35 sec­onds remain­ing to give the Bulldogs a 60–59 lead. Ferris sur­vived two last-second chances to hang on for the victory.

The Bulldogs shot 51 per­cent from the floor, while hold­ing the Lakers to just 31.6 per­cent shoot­ing. Lake Superior made 13 of 17 free throws, while Ferris con­verted seven of its 11 attempts.

Junior for­ward Tiara Adams led Ferris with 16 points and six rebounds, while DeNoyelles added 15 points and three rebounds. Junior guard Becci Houdek had a game-high six assists as well. Houdek said the team’s defense car­ried them through­out the game.

“Being tough on defense has been a huge focus of ours these past few weeks and it was nice to finally see all of our hard work pay off,” said Houdek.

The nail-biter inten­sity car­ried over into the home con­test against Saginaw Valley on Saturday as fresh­man for­ward Kylie Muntz hit a game-winning three-pointer at the buzzer to stun the Cardinals. Houdek said the team went crazy when that shot fell and that it was nice to see Muntz step up in the big time situation.

The Bulldogs trailed by 13 in the sec­ond half, but ral­lied with 24 points over the game’s final ten minutes.

Ferris made just one-third of its shot attempts from the floor, but con­verted 16 of its 18 free throw attempts in the game. The Cardinals out­re­bounded the Bulldogs by 14, but com­mit­ted six more turnovers than Ferris.

Sophomore guard/forward Tricia Principe scored a game-high 21 points for the Bulldogs, mak­ing all ten of her attempted free throws. Junior for­ward Tiara Adams led the team with eight rebounds and added seven points as well. The team improved to 4–2 at home this sea­son with the two victories.

Playing their third game in only five days, the Bulldogs trav­elled to Allendale, Mich. on Monday and lost 64–41 at the hands of rival Grand Valley State.

Grand Valley made 40 per­cent of its shots, while hold­ing Ferris to just 33.3 per­cent. The Bulldogs made just 3 of their 17 three-point shot attempts in the game. Grand Valley spread the ball around effec­tively as six dif­fer­ent play­ers scored at least eight points.

“We got a lot of the shots that we wanted, but couldn’t get any­thing to fall,” said Houdek.
Principe led all scor­ers again with 13 points and also led the Bulldogs with eight rebounds. Adams and fresh­man forward/center Katy Fox added seven points each for the team.

Ferris is 4–9 over­all and 3–5 in the con­fer­ence this sea­son fol­low­ing the week­end action. The Bulldogs travel to Ohio tomor­row to take on the Tiffin Dragons. The team will then play the Ashland Eagles on Saturday. Tiffin is 2–6 in the GLIAC, while Ashland cur­rently holds a 3–5 con­fer­ence record.