Northwest Missouri State women’s basketball opens season with home win over Lincoln

MARYVILLE, Mo. (KQTV) - The Northwest Missouri State women's basketball team opened the season on a high note Monday night as the Bearcats defeated Lincoln 67-42 in the team's home opener.

Sophomore Bailey Birmingham led the team with 16 points, followed by junior Sadie Maas, who had a near double-double with 14 points and 7 rebounds to go along with 3 blocks and 3 steals. Junior Kirsten Hauck had 8 points for Northwest and the junior from Platte Valley Maggie Collins had 7 points.

Northwest also forced 20 Lincoln turnovers Monday night and scored 16 points from those turnovers.

"I think moving forward just effort and energy is a huge thing on defense that we talk about a lot that that goes a long ways along with communication," said Birmingham. So keeping those things as a constant, the other things will come with that."

"I think we pride ourselves on having really good chemistry as a team, we have so much fun on and off the court," said Maas. I think just having everybody back, we don't necessarily have to fill any gaps and the freshmen have just acclimated so well."

"Just taking pride in not giving up angles and open shots, I thought we did a good job of that kind of set the tone," said head coach Austin Meyer. "In a game like this, we didn't shoot it very good, we're three from sixteen from three point land. But we've got to be a team that you play with energy, you get back in transition on defense, you guard the ball, you're going to be in a lot of games no matter what you do offensively."

Northwest next heads to Marshall, Minnesota to play in the SMSU Classic. They'll face Southwest Minnesota State on Friday, November 13th at 5 pm.