UTEP WBB Suffers Tough Loss at North Texas

The Miners played their second consecutive C-USA game on the road on Thursday evening in Denton and fell to North Texas 70-51.  UTEP, who's now 4-11, 1-1 in league play, will conclude their road swing at Rice on Saturday at 1 pm MST.  This marks the first time since the 2007-08 season since the team will have played their first three conference games on the road.  Despite Coach Baker mixing up his starting lineup by including freshman Ariana Taylor who tallied 13 points and sophomore Alexa Hoy who added 12 points, the Miners struggled to stay close the majority of the evening.

UTEP found themselves down 11 at 14-3 early in the first quarter as UNT came out red-hot by hitting their first six shots.  Down 22-14 going into the second quarter, both teams combined for 18 total points in the second quarter as the Mean Green took a 32-22 advantage into the locker room at the half.  The Miners went on a run to narrow UNT's lead to 35-30 with 6:21 left in the third quarter, but the Mean Green would go on a 9-0 run to start pulling away en route to the easy victory.

Following the game Coach Baker mentioned, “tonight was a difficult night for us as we forced UNT to shoot from the perimeter early and they hit shots, we got in a hole and had to fight our way out. We cut the lead to five in the second half but we just ran out of gas.”

For the game, the Miners shot 34.6 percent on 18-52 shooting, and 22.2 percent from downtown, making just 4 of 18 attempts.  The Mean Green created numerous second-chance shots by consistently getting offensive boards, and outrebounded UTEP 43-37.  One silver lining is that the Miners only committed 12 turnovers.  Saturday's game at Rice can be heard on our free 600 ESPN El Paso app.