Nine players combined for 14 steals as the UAA women’s basketball team rolled to its eighth straight win Thursday night in Seattle.
The 10th-ranked Seawolves trounced Seattle Pacific 78-47, their most lopsided victory ever at the Falcons’ Royal Brougham Pavilion.
It was the fifth straight game they’ve held an opponent to fewer than 50 points.
In moving to 13-1 overall and 3-0 in the Great Northwest Athletic Conference, the Seawolves got contributions up and down the lineup and at both ends of the court. They shot 46.6 percent from the field and used a full-court press to force 25 turnovers.
Senior guard Safiyyah Yasin scored a game-high 16 points and stole the ball twice, sophomore guard Jahnna Hajdukovich had 10 points and five rebounds and junior center Tennae Voliva was a force inside with six points, nine rebounds, two blocks and two steals. Guards Yazmeen Goo and Stephanie Jackson each scored nine points and five others had four points or more.
It was an effort so complete that coach Ryan McCarthy’s lone complaint was his team’s 59 percent free throw shooting (16 of 27).
“Aside from our free throw shooting, I can’t find many faults with our performance tonight,” he said in a release from UAA. “We started a little slow offensively, but our first wave of substitutions cranked up the intensity and helped us start to pull away.”
The 39-point victory was the UAA’s biggest winning margin in 32 appearances at Royal Brougham Pavilion; before Thursday, their biggest win was 27 points, 85-58, in December 2014.
Seattle Pacific (2-9 overall, 0-3 GNAC) was limited to 34 percent shooting. The Falcons trailed 38-18 at halftime and opened the second half with a 6-1 run but never came closer than 15 points the rest of the way.
UAA heads to Lacey, Washington, for a Saturday game against Saint Martin’s.