Arkansas guard Izzy Higginbottom stole the show away from Boston College women’s basketball on Thursday night.
Higginbottom scored almost half of her team’s points, posting a career-high 38 points and helping her team to a 75–64 win over the Eagles.
“It is really hard in college basketball to keep a kid from not touching the ball again,” BC head coach Joanna Bernabei-McNamee said. “Then it was about keeping [Higginbottom] in front and not falling for her craftiness because she’s a hell of a player.”
BC (6–4) added to its three-game skid in the loss to Arkansas (5–5), thanks in part to a bleak 6:22-long scoreless stretch in the fourth quarter.
The first nine points of the night came from behind the arc for BC. Andrea Daley started the game off with a three, then T’yana Todd sank two more. Todd made another 3-pointer with 3:07 left in the quarter to put BC up 14–10.
Higginbottom, the SEC leader in points-per-game, almost single-handedly kept her team in the game, though. She scored 10 of the Razorbacks’ 12 first-quarter points.
The Razorbacks kicked off the second quarter with an 11–4 run, giving them their first lead of the night and extinguishing the six-point lead BC took into the quarter.
Dontavia Waggoner won some of the momentum back by sending the game into halftime with an emphatic block into the stands on a Higginbottom layup.
The spurt of momentum showed itself in the opening minutes of the second half, as the Eagles came out with fire, tallying 13 points in the first five minutes. Daley scored almost half of them.
A dry stretch overtook the Eagles after that, though. After a nearly three-minute scoring hiatus, Kaylah Ivey knocked down a 3-pointer from the top of the key, followed by a Waggoner layup that earned her the 1,000th point of her career.
Waggoner ended the game with 15 points.
BC showed aggressiveness attacking the paint, dominating the glass with 17 offensive rebounds going into the fourth quarter. The Eagles ended the game with 24 offensive boards—the most in a game since the 2018–19 season.
“I thought when we crashed, we got a lot of bodies put on us,” Bernabei-McNamee said. “I don’t know that we were rewarded for all of that hard work on the interior.”
With a three-point lead at the end of the third, the only question the Eagles had to face was how to slow down scoring-machine Higginbottom, who had nearly half of the Razorbacks’ 50 points.
BC went cold at the wrong time, allowing Arkansas to execute a 14–0 run, with Higginbottom scoring nine of the 14.
After a timeout with 4:28 remaining, BC committed three turnovers in less than two minutes.
“I called the timeout so we could get back in our press with a little bit of structure,” Bernabei-McNamee said. “We still didn’t, I think, get a good trap.”
After scoring a total of seven points in the final 8:34 of the game, BC failed to get the job done against Higginbottom, surrendering a double-digit loss on the road.
“I think our team hustles and plays hard,” Bernabei-McNamee said. “I just think we have to take it up a notch with our discipline and our IQ.”
