It was a tale of two halves for the Wisconsin women’s basketball team Sunday afternoon as the Badgers fell to Iowa at the Kohl Center 87-75.
More precisely, it was the first few minutes of each half that dictated the way the rest of the half would be played.
In the first half, both teams got out to blistering start. However, it was Wisconsin (8-14 overall, 4-8 Big Ten) that outplayed the Hawkeyes (19-4, 10-2), jumping out to a nine-point (21-12) lead with 13:38 remaining in the first half.
The Badgers got six points apiece from junior guard Tessa Cichy and senior forward Jacki Gulczynski, who were a combined 5-5 from the field, with Gulczynski sinking two three-pointers.
At that point in the game, Wisconsin was shooting 75 percent from the field (9-12), while Iowa shot only 41.7 percent (5-12). The Badgers were 3-3 from beyond the arc, while Iowa missed its only attempt from three. Wisconsin had also committed only one turnover in the first six minutes and 22 seconds.
“We came out kind of suspect in this game,” Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder said. “Wisconsin was hitting everything. Our defense was a little suspect.”
The beginning of the second half was the complete opposite. After the Hawkeyes took a 42-38 lead into halftime, they went on a 17-2 run in the first five minutes and 13 seconds of the half.
“I think a lot of it was us on offense not necessarily executing,” Gulczynski said. “And on the defensive end, we’re so capable, and I think we showed that in the first half. It’s just little breakdowns, little things, little details like footwork or something like that. Things we can fix, and I know we can fix moving forward.”
In the first 4:20 of the half, Wisconsin committed five turnovers, while coughing it up only six times in the first half.
Iowa senior guard Samantha Logic, a Racine, Wisconsin native, led that charge. She finished with a career-high 30 points, had 13 of Iowa’s 21 points in the run that separated the Hawkeyes from the Badgers for good and sealed their 13th win in their last 15 games.
“The lane was there, especially early in the second half,” Logic said. “But it was because of our defense, and being able to push in transition.”
Logic finished shooting 12-18 from the floor, adding seven rebounds and four assists.
“She did a good job of just putting her head down and getting to the rim,” Wisconsin head coach Bobbie Kelsey said. “We probably should’ve made some more adjustments, and I take the blame for that one.
“When you give a team layups, as opposed to jumpers, it’s going to be a little bit easier for them to score … You gotta make them take pull-ups instead of layups, and we didn’t do a very good job of that.”
The Badgers slowed down Iowa’s leading scorer Melissa Dixon. The senior guard came into the game averaging 16.1 points per game, but was held to only two Sunday.
“If people only focus on one person, it’s like, ‘Okay, it opens up the floor for somebody else,'” Bluder said. “We don’t mind when people do that to us.”
That allowed the Hawkeyes to attack the paint, where they outscored the Badgers 46-26.
“We didn’t shut down the paint like we should’ve,” Kelsey said.
For the first time all season, fans occupied the entire lower bowl of the Kohl Center. A vast majority of the crowd wore pink, in support of the Breast Cancer Awareness game, which UW calls the “Pink Game.”
Wisconsin announced the attendance at 11,428, the best at a women’s basketball game since 2010 and the 14th-largest ever.
The large crowd also was due to the large number of Iowa fans in attendance. Logic had large Iowa contingency who took to the road to support her, and Iowa’s fans coordinated two coach buses to take them from Iowa City to Madison.
