— By Bill Cornwell
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. — Marshall’s women’s basketball program is playing later in the calendar than ever before.
The Thundering Herd (25-9) hopes to three wins in the WNIT when Army visits the Cam Henderson Center for Monday’s 6 p.m. matchup in a Great 8 quarterfinal round game.
The contest can be seen on ESPN+.
Marshall earned its way into hosting Monday with Friday’s 72-46 win at Youngstown State. The Herd led by a dozen at halftime and was hardly threatened in the second half, while dominating the Penguins inside and scoring 48 paint points.
Timaya Lewis-Eutsey scored 20 points to lead Marshall. Leyocha Marigney’s contributed a career-high 14 points, seven rebounds and five blocks. Meredith Maier also scored 14 for Marshall and made four of her team’s six three-pointers, while Timberlynn East contributed 12 points to make it four double-figure scorers in a defensively dominant win.
Marshall limited the Penguins to 29 percent shooting and forced 16 turnovers.
“I thought we had a really good effort,” Marshall head coach Juli Fulks said. “This is now our second week where we’ve had really good practices and really good preparation, and I thought you could see that we understood we would need to be really physical inside. Leyocha led that charge with how we defended.”
Army (26-7) has advanced to this stage of the WNIT with wins over NJIT (59-52) and most recently La Salle (74-63) in a game played last Wednesday.
The winner of the first meeting the Herd and Army advances to a WNIT Fab 4 semifinal to face the winner of Cleveland State-Arkansas State, another quarterfinal round matchup being held Monday at ASU. The semifinal will be played either Tuesday or Wednesday at a location to be determined, while the WNIT title game is set for Saturday.
The Black Knights finished 14-4 in the Patriot League before falling to Holy Cross in a conference tournament semifinal.
Katie Kuester is in her first season as head coach at Army. She spent the previous decade as part of the coaching staff at St. Joseph’s and is the daughter of former NBA player and coach John Kuester.
Kya Smith, a 6-foot-1 junior forward, leads Army in scoring with an average of 13.8 points. She’s also the team’s top rebounder with 10.4 boards.
Camryn Tade, a 5-8 guard, averages 13.1 points, while 5-6 senior guard Reese Ericson contributes 11 points.
Eastern Kentucky is a common opponent and defeated Army 74-64 in November, before losing to Marshall in December, 75-50.
The Black Knights went the entirety of the season without losing consecutive contests.
Lewis-Eutsey easily leads Marshall at 19.4 points and is tops on the team in assists (3.9) and steals (3.8), the latter of which has her No. 5 nationally.
Maier and fellow senior Peyton Ilderton aren’t far off double-figure scoring at 9.5 and 9.2 points, respectively, while Ilderton contributes a pair of steals on average.
South Dakota is the lone team to secure a spot in a semifinal to this point. The Coyotes defeated Montana State 65-56 on Sunday and await the winner of Monday’s matchup between George Washington and Illinois State.