Tar Heels Fall on the Road to Hot-Shooting Seminoles

Sunday, January 12

Tallahassee, Fla.

2 PM

North Carolina

Florida State

(Photo courtest of FSU Athletics)

January 12, 2020 | Women's Basketball

Box Score Box Score

By: UNC Athletic Communications

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida State used hot shooting to hand the North Carolina women's basketball team an Atlantic Coast Conference road loss on Sunday, 78-64 at the Donald L. Tucker Center. The Tar Heels fell to 12-4 overall and 3-2 in league play with the loss.

Senior Taylor Koenen led the Tar Heels with 22 points, one shy of matching her career scoring high. She hit a career-best six three-pointers in the game, and the final one made her the 38^th player in program history to reach the 1,000-career-points mark. She comes out of the game with exactly 1,000 career points and is just the fifth player in program history to reach 1,000 points, 700 rebounds (she has 708) and 300 assists (she has 306).

UNC is back in action on Thursday, hosting Miami for a 6 p.m. ACC battle at Carmichael Arena.

The Seminoles (15-2, 4-2 ACC) shot 56.9 percent from the field, the highest for a Tar Heel opponent this season. Nausia Woolfolk led FSU with 21 points and Nicki Ekhomu added 20, but UNC held the Seminoles' top scorer, Kiah Gillespie, to five.

"Florida State shot the ball really well," UNC coach Courtney Banghart said. "I thought we defended for the most part pretty solidly and kept their best scorer to five points, but they just shot way too high a percentage and made some tough shots."

After a back-and-forth game that saw UNC up by four early in the second quarter, the Seminoles outscored the Tar Heels 21-10 through the rest of the period to take a 40-33 lead into halftime.

UNC came out of the break with a 9-2 run, including five by senior guard Madinah Muhammad, to tie the score at 42-42 with 5:56 to play in the period. The game was still tied at the media timeout with just under five minutes remaining, but FSU came out on a 7-0 run to pull ahead. A three-pointer from Koenen cut the margin to four, but Ekhomu answered with a bucket to give the home team a six point lead and UNC was never again closer than that.

FSU led by 17 with just under seven minutes to play, but the Tar Heels kept battling and cut the lead to six, 67-61, with four minutes remaining on a three-pointer by Leah Church. FSU closed the game on an 11-3 run for the final margin, UNC's first double-digit loss of the season.

The 22 for Koenen, who played all 40 minutes, marked her third 20-point game of the season. Junior center Janelle Bailey added 11 points and freshman forward Malu Tshitenge scored 10. Bailey and Tshitenge led the rebounding effort with seven each.

FSU outscored UNC 34-22 in the paint and got 14 points from the foul line (14-20) compared with two for Carolina, which took just four free throws. The Seminoles won the rebounding battle 32-29, but UNC led 13-6 on the offensive glass (six from Tshitenge, who leads the ACC in that category) and had a 11-7 advantage in second-chance points.

"We just kept fighting," Banghart said. "If they're going to give us that heart and they're going defend like that, we've got to have just a bit more purpose on the offensive end."

After playing three of their last four games on the road, the Tar Heels now play back-to-back ACC home games for the first time this season. Miami comes to Carmichael on Thursday and Louisville, UNC's third top-11 opponent in a four-game span, visits on Sunday for a 1 p.m. game.

"Every turnaround feels quick," Banghart said, "because there's always another team coming that's talented and well-coached and physical, and next up that's Miami."