By Big Tony Solorzano<\/p>\n
(Galen Center, Los Angeles) \u2013 The 2011 Pacific Life Pac-10 Basketball Tournament got off to a rollicking start Wednesday afternoon at USC\u2019s Galen Center as the women kicked off the first day of competition with an Arizona-Oregon showdown between the four schools of both states.<\/p>\n
In the first game, the #3 seeded Arizona State Sun Devils (11-7, 27-3) took on the #10 seed Oregon State Beavers (2-16, 9-21), but it was all Arizona State.\u00a0Senior guard Dymond Simon led all scorers with 13 points to lead the Sun Devils to a 50-44 win over Oregon State and advance to Thursday\u2019s quarterfinals where they\u2019ll face (the winner of the Cal-Washington game).<\/p>\n
\u201cOregon State is a tough team, they just do not go away,\u201d said Sun Devil Head Coach Charli Turner Thorne. \u201cWe would get a little bit of a lead and they would fight back. I give them all the credit in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the first half, the Beavers took a 11-9 lead over the Sun Devils on a layup by senior forward El-Sara Greer with 12:17 left in the half, but the Sun Devils responded with an 14-4 run over the next 4:42, before ending the half up 27-20.<\/p>\n
In the second half, the Sun Devils increased their lead to 15 with 16:54 left in the game on Olivia Major\u2019s three-point shot, however, the Beavers began a 12-0 run on the Devils to close the gap to five points on Alyssa Martin\u2019s jumper with 11:45 left.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was a bad stretch, we did not play defense like we\u2019re supposed to, like coach said\u201d said ASU\u2019s Simon. \u201cOnce we started to lock in on their plays and their offensive scorers, it made a big difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
Three more times, the Beavers would close the lead to five points and got as close as three points on another layup by Greer to make the score 43-40 with 7:12 left in the game, but the Beavers could get no closer.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m totally proud of my team and what we did on the court,\u201d said Greer, who closed out her career with the Beavers with nine points and four rebounds in the losing effort. \u201cWe were a hard-fought team, especially in the Pac-10 which is such a tough conference.\u201d<\/p>\n
Big Tony will be reporting\u00a0on the Men’s and Women’s PAC 10 Tournaments from\u00a0Staples Center and Galen Center\u00a0the rest of the\u00a0week.\u00a0Check back for the latest results<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Big Tony Solorzano (Galen Center, Los Angeles) \u2013 The 2011 Pacific Life Pac-10 Basketball Tournament got off to a rollicking start Wednesday afternoon at USC\u2019s Galen Center as the women kicked off the first day of competition with an Arizona-Oregon showdown between the four schools of both states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[871],"tags":[4727,4724,4722,4725,4726,4723],"class_list":["post-15313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-college","tag-alyssa-martin","tag-charli-turner-thorne","tag-dymond-simon","tag-el-sara-greer","tag-olivia-major","tag-womens-pac-10-tournament"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15313"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15327,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15313\/revisions\/15327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/midvalleysports.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}