Lady Cajuns Top North Texas In Double Overtime Thriller

Louisiana's Ragin' Cajun women's basketball team won a thriller in the opening round of the Sun Belt Conference tournament today, defeating North Texas in double overtime by the score of 80-74.

Freshmen Keke Veal (pictured) led the Cajuns in scoring with 17, while fellow freshmen Sylvana Okde finished with 16. Three others joined them in double-figures.

“We pointed to this game way back to last spring.When you look at our history, we hadn’t won a league tournament game in like six years," said a tired coach Garry Broadhead after the win. "We knew that we’d be a little short-handed all year and we might not have the best of records, but we knew that if we focused hard, we could win a tournament game and end that streak.

“I just knew that we were going to get it done, even if it took five or six overtimes.  This team has been fighters all year long and even though we haven’t won as many as we’ve lost, there have been times when you could see this kind of determination."

Despite only having 7 active and healthy players, Broadhead's squad campaigned to their coach to play a full court press on defense. The trapping led to 26 turnovers by the Mean Green, a big reason why the Cajuns were victorious.

“The game got down to defense and the one thing that we’ve been able to do this year is defend.  We’ve lost games this year because we couldn’t score a basket when we needed to, but we haven’t lost one yet because we’ve had the lead and couldn’t stop them from scoring," explained Broadhead.

“I feel for North Texas because they played a great game, it was a classic college tournament game."

Indeed it was. Louisiana will try to ride their wave of momentum to another upset win tomorrow when they battle #3 seeded WKU. Tip-off from Hot Springs is set for 2:00.