By Joe Whalen
A burst of energy Saturday signaled the return of the St. John’s women’s basketball team after a month of play on the road. The Red Storm, boosted by a brief pre-game ceremony honoring first-year coach Kim Barnes-Arico’s recent 100th career victory, caught Seton Hall off guard, opening an early lead against the Pirates.
Once the pace settled, however, St. John’s fell prey to a lack of motion on offense — and fell behind Seton Hall, which secured its fourth victory in a row by displaying impressive pressure defense, handing the Red Storm a 66-41 loss before 625 fans at Alumni Hall.
With its third straight defeat in conference play, St. John’s (6-8, 0-3) feels its growing pains. Barnes-Arico, a former coach at Adelphi and N.J. Institute of Technology, hopes her 101st career victory will be the Red Storm’s first against a Big East opponent in two years.
“That’s what we’re concerned about right now: getting this team to be competitive in the Big East,” Barnes-Arico said. “And for a period of time tonight we were, but we didn’t sustain it. We don’t have the depth and we don’t have the mental focus to sustain it for long periods of time.”
The defeat produced an even bigger loss: an abdominal strain to Danielle Rainey (15.5 ppg, 5.2 rpg), the team’s leading scorer and rebounder. After registering her first career double-double with 11 points and 10 rebounds, the senior forward from Los Angeles fell in traffic under the basket with 7:49 left in the second half.
Rainey will likely miss the next two games — against No. 16 Notre Dame on Tuesday and Pittsburgh on Saturday.
Prior to her injury, Rainey sparked the day’s sole statistical victory for St. John’s: a 43-27 edge in rebounding.
“I thought we did a great job on the boards and I thought we did a pretty decent job defensively,” Barnes Arico said.
The Red Storm surged to an early 13-6 lead behind strong inside play — and its game plan of shutting down Seton Hall’s leading scorer Charlene Thomas (14.2 ppg). With muscle at the low post from Patrycja Gulak and Kati Kurtosi, each of whom stands 6-foot-4, St. John’s denied all of Thomas’s early scoring efforts and held the center to a total of 9 points.
But Thomas’s teammates picked up the slack, creating a 32-13 turnover margin as Seton Hall (8-4, 2-0) built a six-point lead by intermission. Forward Leslie Ardon finished with 16 points and guard Monica Johnson had 15.
“Obviously, it was our turnovers that killed us and their points off of our turnovers,” Barnes Arico said. “Some bad turnovers resulted in easy baskets for them.”
In the second half, the Pirates tightly guarded the perimeter, forcing bad shots and a couple of shot clock violations. In its previous 11 games, Seton Hall held its opponents to an average of 55.9 points.
“They were hedging hard on defense,” said guard Reka Szavuly, who finished with 5 points. “It was really hard to get open and get the ball. We had a lot of turnovers because we couldn’t get open…We had such difficulty getting the wing open, the whole play was slowing down.”
Although the Red Storm has already doubled last year’s win total, picking up speed this season may take some time, as both Notre Dame, which lost Saturday to Miami, and Pittsburgh have winning records.
Toward the end of the month, however, St. John’s will play three consecutive games against neighbors in the Big East cellar: Providence, Rutgers and Syracuse.
“I think if we have one win in the Big East, it will give us a big relief and we can go on and win more after that,” Szavuly said. “We just need one real bad.”
