Bobcats cannot answer Riddle

When things went wrong for Ohio this week on the road, coach Sylvia Crawley didn’t get angry. She started snowball fights with her players.

On a two-game road trip, the Bobcats endured their bus getting stuck in the snow, a player getting sick with food poisoning, leaving a pair of shoes behind, and losing Wednesday night to Missouri. It was Crawley’s first loss as a head coach and dropped the Bobcats to 5-1.

Crawley, who was a captain at North Carolina from 1993-94 and played with the San Antonio Silver Stars in 2003 and 2004, said she brings a player’s perspective to her coaching.

“I knew that as a coach, I panic, they’re going to panic,” she said. “I remained calm throughout this whole road trip. When things didn’t happen our way, I didn’t panic, because as a player, I see my coach panic, and everything trickles down from the head. As a player, I said when I’m a coach, I’m never going to react that way. ”

Missouri beat Ohio 70-67, with Eetisha Riddle scoring 22 to extend her streak to three games with at least 20 points.

“They attacked us inside, and they were very aggressive,” Crawley said. “Their center’s a left-hand player. We wanted to sit on her right shoulder and make her turn the other way. They were tough, and we’re going to learn from this. ”

Riddle’s left-handed fury is one of the Tigers’ prized weapons. Crawley said the team was expecting Missouri to be hard to handle under the basket, but watching videos to prepare can’t compare to learning from the experience of playing a team like the Tigers.

“Tish was a pretty solid presence in the paint and they didn’t know what to do with her,” Missouri coach Cindy Stein said. “She created a lot of things for us, because when she was one-on-one in there, she could score.”

With a nine-point lead and fewer than three minutes left, the Tigers (8-1) appeared to have the game locked up, but the Bobcats rallied in the remaining seconds. Stein said the challenge of working through nine lead changes will help the team, even though a tight game isn’t what she would have chosen.

Stein joked that she hoped not to lose to a first-year head coach, but praised Ohio’s program under Crawley’s direction.

“I’ve watched a difference in that team,” Stein said. “She’s definitely pushing all the right buttons.”