Liberty women’s basketball falls short in conference tournament championship

Despite experiencing a new conference, the Liberty Lady Flames basketball team found themselves in a familiar position when they made the ASUN conference championship game. The Lady Flames defeated the Jacksonville Dolphins in the first round 65-53. In the second round, Liberty handily beat the North Florida Ospreys 65-51. This set up a matchup against Florida Gulf Coast for a bid to the NCAA Tournament.

In the championship game, the FGCU Eagles beat the Lady Flames for the third time this season 72-49. The 28-6 first quarter advantage stuck out immediately as the main reason the Eagles controlled this game to win their third consecutive ASUN championship and complete an undefeated season of in-conference play. 

Green wants that first quarter ingrained in the minds of his players. 

“We won’t do it this week, but we are going to spend a lot of time looking at that quarter,” Green said. “I want it to eat away at them over the summer. Besides that quarter, we played them close.” 

Liberty was 12-3 in conference play (Photo by KJ Jugar)

During the Lady Flames inaugural ASUN season, they encountered their share of troubles when they started the year 4-12. 

“It took some time to find the right ingredient for our team,” Green said. “For several players, it was their first time operating out there. Emily Lytle and Ria Gulley just had their freshman year, then they had to sit for a year, and now they’re thrown out there as sophomores. They may academically be juniors, but they haven’t had those maturing experiences.”

After the slow start to the year, the Lady Flames rebounded exceptionally well by finishing the year 12-3 before falling in the title game. 

“The big takeaway from this year is that we can compete and we can win,” Green said. “Everything we were not successful at was small. One of the verses that we always look at is Zechariah 4:10, which says don’t despise the little things. We can fix those.” 

Green emphasized that passing is one of the small things that took time for the team to develop over the course of the season. 

(Photo by KJ Jugar)

“Early in the year we weren’t sharing the ball very well at all,” Green said. “We became much better, and that’s what leads to games with 18 or 25 assists. We were a statistically much better passing team in the second half of the season.” 

Overall, Green is happy with the growth of the team throughout the season. 

“Our culture is the biggest key to our success,” Green said. “That’s something we need to keep working on, though. Culture is constantly changing from year-to-year. We’ll have new players that will have to learn to co-exist with the team. As long as we can do that, we can be successful.” 

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