The San Diego State women’s basketball team played in the semifinals of the Mountain West Championships against Boise State Tuesday night where they secured the win 72-69 at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas.
Adryana Quezada was the star player, scoring a season-high 26 points with five rebounds and three assists.
“I think to us it’s not a shocker or anything new,” Kim Villalobos said. “We know AD (Quezada) can do that on any night. It’s really nice having a teammate you can rely on always and having her in your corner because it just feels like we’ll win every game.”
Quezada was able to give the Aztecs a great amount of points in the second-half scoring 17 adding three rebounds. With Quezada’s significance, she finds a way to outshoot players and find ways around them.
She has brought in fire this season offensively and her improvements throughout it are what showed Tuesday night against the Broncos. Throughout this season Quezada has shown the audience that she is not afraid to attack the basket and go for hard shots.“She’s a hard shot maker, and I get on her all the time because she’s on the floor too darn much, but she makes big baskets at timely times and she’s hard to guard because we don’t know what shot is going up,” said head coach Stacie Terry-Hutson.
The Aztecs had a slow start and the Broncos took advantage for the majority of the first quarter. It wasn’t until 34 seconds left that the Aztecs took their first lead when Villalobos made a layup to help the Aztecs go up by one point with the score 16-15.
For the second and third quarters, the Aztecs were still in control of the game offensively. It wasn’t until the fourth quarter that the Broncos were coming in close with the Aztecs.
Boise State took its second lead of the night since the first quarter when Mya Hansen scored a free throw to help the Broncos go up 66-65 with 2:35 left in the fourth.
The Aztecs secured the win offensively with Quezada going to the free-throw line and making both of her free-throw shots with 14 seconds remaining in the game. SDSU got one last stop Tatum Thompson went for the jumper and missed, which Villalobos rebounded and called “game.”
SDSU had to battle physically with multiple players getting hurt. On the Aztec side, Quezada, Lewis and Abby Prohaska were a couple of those players getting fouled by the Broncos, who in total had 22 fouls.
At the end of the night, the Aztecs statistics were 46% on field goal shooting, 70% for free throws and 14% from 3-points.
The Broncos had 20 turnovers while the Aztecs only had nine.
“That was a big thing for us,” Lewis said. “That number is huge, and I think that’s what got us the win. Our defense was great. I was proud of everybody that stepped on the floor today.”SDSU has been dialed in over the final weeks to be ready for the tournament.
“We’ve been able to execute down the stretch, and that started probably a couple of weeks ago at New Mexico — I thought we played a very mature, disciplined game even though we lost by three,” Terry-Hutson said. “Since then, they’ve just been really locked in, trying to learn and been extremely coachable.”
The team’s mentality and preparation down the stretch have made a difference.
“I want to say that my staff has done a phenomenal job preparing them, and they’ve been locked in with those scouts,” Terry-Hutson said. “But there was a lot of hours watching film and staying up late and getting up early, and my staff has done a great job preparing them.”
The Aztecs’ last time heading to the Mountain West Championship was in 2013. They haven’t won a Mountain West Tournament title since 2012. It is Terry-Hutson’s first Mountain West Championship Game appearance as head coach.
“We’re beyond excited and we’re happy that we were the group to be able to do that,” Prohaska said.
The Aztecs will face No. 1 seed UNLV, who has won the past two Mountain West tournaments today at 7:30 p.m. at the Thomas & Mack Center.
“We’re going to play our game and do the things we want to do and play hard and defend and hopefully come away with a championship,” Terry-Hutson said.
