Lady Mustangs open season with win

Box Score The Master's women's basketball team opened the 2024-25 campaign with a 69-59 win over the La Sierra Golden Eagles Wednesday night in The MacArthur Center.

For Head Coach Fonda Wilson it was her first win as the new coach for the Lady Mustangs.

"This game was pretty fun," Wilson said. "We started out kinda slow, but really executed and turned it over into a positive for us.

The game opened with La Sierra jumping out to a 14-6 lead. But that seemed to wake up TMU, going on a 10-0 run to take the lead.

But the team didn't stop there as it transitioned through the first quarter and into the second with the throttle to the floor, out-scoring the Golden Eagles 13-5 to go up by 10 at 29-19 with 4:26 to play in the half. A 7-0 flurry at the end of the half sent the teams to the locker room with The Master's up 34-29.

"When we first started I felt like we were anxious, but then we started to relax and we got into it," Coach Wilson said. "We started to execute our offense, we started to do things on defense. I think our defense was great early on."

The third quarter became an extension of what happened in the second as the Lady Mustangs out-scored La Sierra 21-9 in the quarter. Both Marin Lenz and Laney Grider scored six in the 10-minute frame to give The Master's a 55-38 lead.

That lead would grow to 20 with 7:45 to play. But TMU started to get into foul trouble. Lenz, Lexi Hernandez and Kelly Mathiesen fouled out, enabling the Golden Eagles to hit 9 of 15 from the free throw line and add six field goals to outscore The Master's 21-14 in the quarter. But the lead was too great to overcome.

Lenz led the Lady Mustangs with 14 points, with both Lexi Hernandez (13 points, 12 rebounds) and Alli VanKooten (10 points, 12 rebounds) getting double-doubles. Kelly Mathiesen also finished with 10 points.

Marin is the glue that keeps us together, and Kelly came to play today," Wilson said. "And then there was our post. We can't do without our post. It's going to be so nice to see [Hernandez and VanKooten] work together."

The Master's will head to Great Falls, Mont. next to first take on Montana State-Northern on Friday at 7 p.m. followed by the University of Providence (MT) on Saturday at 5 p.m.