Coming Up Big
January 31, 2006 10:48 PM | General
January 31, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – LaQuita Owens admits she spent the entire morning in classes daydreaming about Tuesday night’s game against No. 11 DePaul. West Virginia coach Mike Carey, for one, is mighty glad she did.
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| West Virginia's LaQuita Owens scored a career-high 20 points to lead West Virginia to a stunning 82-70 win over No. 11 DePaul Tuesday night at the WVU Coliseum.
All-Pro Photography/Dale Sparks |
Owens scored a career-high 20 points replacing leading scorer Meg Bulger to lead the Mountaineers to one of their biggest upset victories in school history. WVU’s 82-70 triumph over the Blue Demons was just the third win over a ranked team under Carey, and was the highest ranked team West Virginia has knocked off in 14 years.
And Owens, a 5-foot-9-inch guard from Charlotte, N.C., was without question one of the main reasons Tuesday night.
“The whole day I was concentrating on what I had to do,” she said. “I couldn’t get over-motivated but I knew I had to come in and step up. I told Meg this win is going to be for her and I was going to play my hardest and do everything I could to get it for her.”
Bulger, the Big East’s third-leading scorer averaging 19.8 points per game, went down with what is most likely a season-ending knee injury at St. John’s (results of Bulger’s MRI will be revealed Wednesday). In her place stepped Owens, West Virginia’s sometimes good and sometimes not so good sophomore.
Owens scored 14 in a win over Georgetown earlier this year and also had 12 in a big win over Louisville. West Virginia assistant coach Chester Nichols, the man who recruited her out of Myers Park High School, felt she had the athletic ability to one day be a solid college player.
“One thing you could tell right away was that she could shoot the basketball and she had offensive skills,” Nichols said. “The question was whether or not she could play defense the way Coach Carey wants her to play defense. She’s got a long way to go but she is getting better.”
Nichols admits he basically stumbled on to Owens while recruiting her high school teammate Takisha Granberry, now playing at Virginia.
“We were going through an evaluation period and she happened to do a few good things and you could kind of see that she had potential,” Nichols said.
Owens made three starts last year as a freshman and averaged a very ordinary 2.3 points per games. In 18 games this year, she was averaging 4.4 points per game and was shooting under 37 percent from the floor heading into the DePaul game. But sometimes players dig deep within themselves and rise to the occasion and Owens, having the enormous pressure of filling Bulger’s large shoes, did just that.
“We all had to step up: it couldn’t be just one player,” Owens said. “We all had to play together to come out with this big win.
“You’ve got to believe in yourself and you’ve got to believe you can do the things that you can do,” she said.
After Tuesday night’s remarkable performance, LaQuita Owens is starting to make believers out of her teammates and coaches.
“Tonight I’m glad she got a chance to step up and make some big shots,” Nichols said. “You knew she had some potential but you never really know for sure.
“I went over and gave her the biggest hug after the game. I just couldn’t be happier for her,” Nichols said.
The same goes for Bulger, who was leading the post-game celebration in the locker room.
“(Meg) was speechless,” said Owens. “She just kept saying good game to me.”
It’s a good bet the DePaul players were speechless as well.
