By CLAUDE SCILLEY

Given the circumstance, it was a fairly benign thing. Still, it had Dave Wilson squirming just a bit.

A 9-2 run by the Laurentian Voyageurs late in the third quarter had allowed them to cut seven points off a fairly large Queen’s Golden Gaels lead. “We hadn’t scored for something like three minutes,” Wilson said, “and (I’m thinking), ‘Ah, don’t give them a hint that they can get back in the game.’

“Next thing you know, Liz pops a three.”

Not only did Liz Boag hit a three-point basket, she stole the ball on Laurentian’s subsequent trip up the floor and took it to the Voyageurs’ basket for two more points, restoring the Gaels’ lead to 25 points.

For all intents and purposes that was the last that was heard from the visiting Voyageurs, who ultimately were defeated 80-52 in an opening-round Ontario University Athletics women’s basketball playoff game in the Queen’s Athletics and Recreation Centre.

 “Liz is that player that, when you need something, it’s Liz (that gives it to you),” her coach said, after the Gaels earned a trip to a quarter-final match with the Wilfrid Laurier Golden Hawks Saturday in Waterloo.

“If you haven’t scored for a period of time, Liz hits a three. If we’re struggling on defence, Liz deflects the ball or steals the ball outright.

“She gives confidence to everybody around her when she’s doing stuff. She can relax people when she’s on the floor. Everybody feels comfortable when Liz is running the show.”

Boag, the La Salle Secondary School grad, finished the final home game of her intercollegiate career with a game-best 19 points, a performance that included four three-pointers. Indeed, the third-quarter spurt wasn’t the first time she’d asserted herself, offensively, in the game. The Gaels were leading but struggling to take the lead beyond 10 points late in the first half when Boag hit a three-pointer and a field goal in rapid succession. That not only took the lead to 15 points, it clearly deflated the Voyageurs, who didn’t score again until the second half, by which time they were down by 22.

By then, any fears aroused by leading just 18-14 late in the first quarter had been put to rest.

“We were a little tight off the start,” Wilson said. “It’s always an adjustment to go to playoffs. As much as we try to treat every game the same … it’s still a little extra. We were a little tight with our shooting. We missed a lot of shots that started to get rolling in the second quarter.”

Actually, the Gaels trailed from the start until, you guessed it, Boag hit a three-point shot with about three minutes left in the first quarter, to give Queen’s its first lead of the game, 16-14.

“We were nervous,” Boag said. “Once we relaxed and got into the flow we did well. Once you get into the game, you’re no longer thinking anymore, you’re just playing. It just took a little bit of time for us to get our defensive stops and once we (did that) we were able to relax on offence.”

The other element of the Gaels’ slow start was tentative defensive play. Wilson said it got better once players calmed down and started doing what they’d planned to do.

“I’d love to say I had the magic answer, but we had prepared as well as we could for what they do and what we wanted to do against it,” the coach said. “We just struggled with the execution at the start, and got more and more comfortable as we started putting pressure on them.”

That pressure was designed to disrupt the attack of a team that takes 30 shots per game from beyond the three-point arc.

“Basically, we ran at them to get them off the three-point line, make them drive and pull up and shoot after that,” Wilson said. The plan worked. Laurentian took just 13 shots from three-point range, and made just four of them.

“The first three minutes of the game we didn’t do a good job,” Wilson said, “but after that we got out on the shooters we made them think of (doing) something else, because they didn’t feel comfortable shooting the ball.”

Meanwhile, the Gaels were tearing it up from three-point range, oddly more successful shooting the ball from three-point terrain (53.3 per cent) than they were from inside the arc (32 per cent) in the first half.

“We got a lot of offensive rebounds,” Boag said. “Our posts did a really good job, and our guards, of crashing the (offensive) glass. We have size inside on them. We’re bigger at most positions, and if we’re not bigger, we’re stronger, so we knew (Laurentian) didn’t have much of an inside presence.”

Queen’s held a 55-37 edge in rebounding, and the Voyageurs held just a 25-19 advantage under their own glass.

“We got a lot of kick-outs for the three-point shots and they were just falling. We have the capability of really opening the floodgates from the outside, and they were just dropping today.”

In all, five different Gaels combined for a dozen three-point baskets.

Besides Boag’s 19 points, on a night when 11 different players would score, the Gaels got 16 off the bench from Abby Dixon and 13 from Andrea Priamo. Dixon had eight points—including a pair of threes—in the first quarter, helping to keep the game close while the Gaels found their footing.

Devenae Bryce and Danielle Harris scored 12 points apiece for the Voyageurs. Harris was 7-for-8 from the free-throw line for a team that managed just one field goal in the first nine minutes of the fourth quarter.

In their only meeting of the regular year, Laurier defeated Queen’s 56-53 in Kingston in mid-November. It was a game where neither team ever led by more than seven points, and one in which the Gaels shot less than 24 per cent from the field and gave up 22 fourth-quarter points—and the lead—to a Hawks team that finished the regular year 17-3, as the No. 6-ranked team in Canada.