NCAA – Greensboro Women’s Basketball: Thomas More 76, GC 63

Crestview Hills, Ky. – Jayme Thiem scored a game high 21 points and led Thomas More (29-0) over Greensboro College, 76-63, in a first round NCAA Division III tournament game on Friday night.

The Pride–which stayed close to the unbeaten Saints most of the game–end their season at 21-8. The defeat ended an 11-game winning streak for the USA South champions.

Dione Eccles led The Pride with 18 points. Danielle Duncan notched her 13th double-double with 15 points and 12 rebounds. Fellow freshman Ashley Burnette contributed 11 points.

“I’m proud of what this group did this year and what our program has done getting back to the tournament,” said GC Head Coach Jason Tuggle. “We’re a young team and we didn’t do the things down the stretch in order to win the game. We’ve been making plays and getting stops recently, and they did that at crunch time tonight.”

The Pride held the lead–by as much as 3 points–in the first half. The Saints led 35-31 at the break. TMU led by as many as 6 points in the opening 20 minutes.

In the second half, Thomas More went on a 10-4 run over in the first 3:21 and built a 9 point lead. Yet Burnette hit a three-pointer to put the score at 50-48 with 11:03 left.

The Saints, however, went on another run and got the lead to 10 at 62-52 four minutes later. TMU’s biggest lead was 16 points with less than 3 minutes remaining.

Thomas More won the battle of the boards 39-34.

The Saints shot better (44 to 39 percent) than The Pride and made 9 three-pointers to 5 for GC. TMU entered the game averaging 7 treys per contest and defeated its opponents by 25 points per game.

Thomas More will play Oglethrope on Saturday night for a berth in the Sweet 16.Greensboro’s last defeat was on Feb. 6 at Methodist, 79-68.

Box: http://www.gborocollege.edu/athletics/sports/Wbasketball/wb0708/gcw0307.htm

Final GC record 21-8