March 4, 2004
PROVO, Utah - The San Diego State women's basketball team erased an 11-point second half deficit to tie the score at 38, but was unable to complete the comeback, falling 56-45 to host Brigham Young Thursday night at the Marriott Center. With the loss, the Aztec dropped to 8-18 overall and 3-10 in league play and will be the No. 7 seed at next week's Mountain West Conference championship. The Cougars improved to 15-12 and 5-8 in the MWC in 2003-04.
Junior Candace Mattson (Alpine, Utah), making her debut in her home state, played a career best 38 minutes, falling just one rebound short of her first double-double with 13 points and team game-high nine rebounds. Freshman Michelle Elliott (Pasco, Wash.) was the only other Aztec in double-figures, scoring 13 points with three, three-pointers. Sophomore Ashlee Dunlap (Los Angeles, Calif.) added eight points and seven rebounds.
The two sides started the contest by combining for three, three-pointers as SDSU went up by three at 6-3. Elliott added a lay-up to push the Aztec advantage out to five points at 8-3, but the Cougars would come back to build a nine-point lead of their own at 19-10 with the help of a 12-0 run over a span of five minutes.
Mattson, making her first career start in an MWC game, cut into the BYU deficit on her own, draining a pair of free throws and adding a lay-up as the Aztecs trailed by five at 19-14. The teams traded baskets before Dunlap hit a long jumper and a reserve lay-up capping a 10-2 SDSU run to get to within one point at 21-20.
BYU's Julie Sullivan, however, restored order for her team, scoring six of the Cougars' next nine points as the Aztecs trailed by seven at 30-23 heading into the locker room, despite owning a distinct advantage in field goal percentage (40.9 to 30.3).
BYU widened its lead to as many as 11 points with the first two baskets of the half, but a Mattson three-pointer, just the third of her career, sparked a SDSU rally as the Aztecs trailed by just four heading into the first media timeout of the second, 20-minute period.
The Aztecs kept the pressure on, coming all the way back to within one point with the help of a 6-0 run at 37-36, capped by an Elliott lay-up as the freshman reached double-figures in scoring for the 19th time this season.
A Mattson lay-up equalized the game at 38-38 with just over nine minutes remaining, but was short-lived as Heather Hansen hit a three-pointer at the top of the arc to give the Cougars a 41-38 lead. BYU moved up by five before another Hansen three put her team ahead by eight, as the Cougars went on to pull out the 56-45 win.
BYU was led by Sullivan's career high 22 points, while Hansen finished with nine all from beyond the arc.
San Diego State heads to the University of Utah Saturday for a 3 p.m. (MST) match-up with the Utes at the Huntsman Center. The contest is the Aztecs' final regular season game, as the Mountain West Conference championship kicks off March 10, in Denver, Colo.