On Sunday, Cal women’s basketball knocked off the #20/18 ranked Arkansas Razorbacks by a final score of 84-80 at Haas Pavilion. Cal improves to 3-2 on the season while Arkansas falls to 5-1. Senior forward Jaelyn Brown had a huge game for Cal with 30 points and 12 rebounds while senior center CJ West finished with 14 points and 12 rebounds. Redshirt junior guard Chelsea Dungee was the top performer for Arkansas with 24 points and 5 rebounds.
“Obviously, this was a great win for the program,” Cal head coach Charmin Smith said with a smile after the game. “I think this is a big confidence booster for us. We just stuck with it. We refused to lose and it felt really good.”
“My focus today was defense, if anything,” Brown said. “I was not worried about the offensive end. My teammates had it. I was trying to shut down Dungee and it just came to me. I wasn’t thinking and that’s probably the best part.”
Early on, Arkansas had the advantage, up 14-11 with 4:14 to go in the 1st quarter. Redshirt junior guard Amber Ramirez and Dungee each had 5 points for the Razorbacks while Brown and West each had 4 points for the Golden Bears. Cal was shooting 4-7 from the field. At the end of the 1st quarter, Arkansas was up 25-20 as Dungee (9 points) and Ramirez (8 points) continued to ball out. Evelien Lutje Schipholt was up to 4 points for Cal, doing a good job of scoring inside.
With 4:55 to go in the half, Arkansas was up 33-32. Brown was up to 13 points on 6-9 shooting from the field, lighting the Razorbacks’ defense on fire. As a result of Brown’s stellar shooting, Cal was able to take a 47-39 lead into halftime. Brown was up to 19 points and 6 rebounds while West was up to 10 points and 10 rebounds. With 0.1 seconds left on the clock, Brown got fouled on a tip in, allowing her to go to the foul line, where she made both shots. Having an eight point cushion at the half instead of six gave Cal a little more breathing room.
“Oh definitely, that was a huge game changer,” Brown said of those free throws. “My team was, I don’t even know how to answer that question. My team had me the whole entire time. We were fighting. That really just changed the mentality going into the second half. Even though we had a little bit of a mess up.”
“Yeah, we were pretty gassed,” Smith added. “To just be able to get a couple points on the board going in settled us down a little bit. The spread felt a little bit more comfortable. Yeah, eight feels better against a team that’s fifth in the nation in made three-pointers than six. They’re good. They’re second in the nation in free throws made, I believe fifth in three-pointers made, seventh in scoring, so again we just wanted to make sure that every point they got they had to work for and then we knew that they would allow us to score because it’s not really their focus on the defensive end for them.”
Coming out of halftime, this game continued to be tight as Cal led 53-52 with 5:08 to go in the 3rd quarter. Arkansas was starting to comeback, resulting in a smart timeout by Smith. That timeout appeared to work as Cal would build their lead back up, going up 70-64 at the end of the 3rd quarter. Smith did a nice job of rallying her troops and getting them to buy in. Through three quarters, Cal had good ball movement (15 assists) and shot selection (50.9%). Brown was up to 24 points and 9 rebounds as Cal was in the driver’s seat to get the win.
With 7:17 to go, Cal forced Arkansas to call for time as Leilani McIntosh found Alaysia Styles inside for the easy basket. At this point, it looked like Cal may be on the verge of a double-digit lead. Rather than caving, Arkansas responded and went on a 6-0 run, cutting Cal’s lead to one point (77-76) with 4:12 to go. After looking like they might cruise to a comfortable win, Cal was once again in a dog fight.
“What we told them was that they couldn’t do anything that we didn’t allow them to do,” Smith said. “So, when they caught up with us, it was because we had lapses mostly defensively. We gave them wide open threes that they shouldn’t have had. When we were locked in on the game plan and the scout and took away the shots that they were comfortable taking, then it made the game easier. So, I think we did a good job towards the end of controlling the let downs, not giving them the easy looks, and it allowed us to hold onto the lead.”
With 2:48 to go, Brown hit a huge 3-pointer for Cal to give them an 82-78 lead. No one would score for almost two minutes as Arkansas would call timeout with 51.7 to go. With a four point lead and under a minute to play, Cal just needed to make sure they wouldn’t give the game away. Arkansas was able to cut Cal’s lead to two points (82-80) after Alexis Tolefree scored. With 21.7 to go and 13 seconds left on the shot clock, Cal had a possession in which they would need to get up a good shot.
Cal would fail to get any field goals to drop, but they did do a nice job of grabbing offensive rebounds and preventing Arkansas from getting the ball back. As a result, Cailyn Crocker was able to get to the foul line with 2.5 seconds to go. After making both of her foul shots, Cal had an 84-80 lead, leaving Arkansas with not enough time to come back. Cal walked out with an 84-80 win and the first win over a ranked team in the Charmin Smith era.
“I was really thankful we had timeouts left,” Smith said. “I’m really anxious to watch the last four to five minutes of this game just for me in learning. This is my first time calling the shots in this type of situation and they were very attentive and focused and listened well and executed what we asked them to do. Cailyn made some huge free throws. With a team that shoots the three-ball with the way that they do, we didn’t want to just be up three or up two. We needed that four-point cushion and that was really helpful.”
When looking at the box score, what most jumps out is the 49-32 advantage Cal had on the glass. Cal had 19 offensive rebounds, really pounding Arkansas inside. As a result of their efforts on the boards, Cal had 18 second chance points to Arkansas’ 8. When you look back on this game, that stands out more than anything else.
“Charmin has been on us for a while, since we’ve gotten here, I think to put a big emphasis on boxing out and rebounding,” West said. “I feel like we have this up and down cycle where a couple of games in a row we’ll box out, rebound really really hard, and then some games we just get people easy looks. But today was a change of mentality, I think, and we had inspiration from all of our teammates. Evelien, everybody just crashing and having that energy just really inspires you to do all the little things.”
One interesting note is that senior center Chen Yue was a healthy DNP. Charmin Smith said that Arkansas’ smaller, quicker players made it unnecessary to play Chen today, though she did stress that she will be needed against teams that have more traditional post players.
“Yeah, I thought CJ and Eve were just really beasty and I didn’t get deeper in that rotation,” Smith said. “I think Chen’s very capable and is definitely a part of the rotation, it just didn’t happen today, and she’ll be ready. She knows. Really what Chen has brought for us is phenomenal defense. Interior defense and this was more of a perimeter defense oriented game with three-point shooters. So not necessarily her strength. But we know the bigs are coming.”
This was a good, collective, all-around team win for Cal. While Jaelyn Brown stole the show, she was not the only one who contributed to this victory. Cal had 25 points off the bench and got everybody involved. Having a freshman in Cailyn Crocker ice the game away at the foul line just underscores how well everyone is buying in and how the freshmen are playing more like upperclassmen.
“I think at this point, we’re not surprised anymore,” West said of the freshmen. “They are so consistent in their effort and how hard they play in practice, how hard they work, all the time they put in outside of practice, getting extra shots up, working out and all that stuff. So, at this point it’s like we expect this high standard from you, so anything less is, like we don’t look at them just now as like oh, they’re freshmen, that’s a freshman mistake or whatever. We hold them to really really high standards now and they’ve proved that they can take it.”
Up next for Cal is the Cal Classic, a post-Thanksgiving tournament. Cal will face North Carolina Central on Friday at 1:00 PM PST. Penn State and Long Beach State to follow at 3:15 PM. The championship and consolation games will be played on Saturday.
