<span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>Cajun women win West</span>
Hall, players enjoy remarkable turnaround in program

Hell has officially frozen over.

Pigs flew Thursday night.

Common wisdom was that both of those would happen before the University of Louisiana's women's basketball team won a conference title.

Not that program ... one that hadn't had a winning season in 18 years, and one that for over a decade was a running joke in the Sun Belt Conference.

"Honestly, no one ever thought this was going to happen," said Ragin' Cajun senior forward Bernette Tolston. "It was only a dream."

The ghosts of disappointed players past, those floating around the rafters of Long Gym, had never seen anything like it Thursday night ... a packed gym, frenzied fans looking to shake 34 years of frustration and watch their team win a share of the Sun Belt West Division.

Their Cajuns didn't disappoint.

Thanks to Melissa Bratton's career-high 22 points and balanced scoring from the rest of the squad - not to mention a stellar defensive effort - the host Cajuns made history Thursday night with a 59-47 victory over Arkansas-Little Rock.

The win improved the Cajuns to 19-8 overall and, more importantly, to 9-5 in the Sun Belt. UL holds a one-game lead over North Texas (8-6) with only one game to go, and can finish no worse than tied with UNT for the West title even with a loss Saturday in their regular-season finale against Arkansas State.

The Cajuns could have won the crown outright on Thursday, but UNT rallied for a 59-56 win over a South Alabama team that had led that contest virtually the entire game.

Did that result take some of the luster off Thursday's post-game celebration?

After what the Cajun women's program has been through since 1971, not on your life.

"The first thing someone asked me when I took this job was what the hell I was thinking," said Cajun coach J. Kelley Hall. Pointing to his team's mid-court celebration, he added, "this is what I was thinking about."

Tolston and senior center Anna Petrakova were the only veterans who pre-dated Hall as part of the Cajun program, and they remember their freshman seasons when UL went 1-14 in league play.

On Thursday, Tolston was wearing the net that she and her teammates cut down. And, after all those years, they didn't need anyone to show them how to do it.

"Coach told us this was going to happen when he recruited us," said junior guard Ashley Blanche, who had 12 points and eight rebounds in the win. "He told us if we worked hard every day and came to play, this would happen."

Bratton wasn't around for the previous years of disappointment, joining the team from Kilgore Junior College prior to this season, but she knew what Thursday meant.

"Every day, the girls that have been around here talked about how tough it was," she said. "They didn't have the athletes to compete. They talked about what an opportunity this was, and we weren't going to let it slip away."

For a few moments, it looked like that could happen, as UALR (9-17, 3-10) battled back from a 14-point deficit with 14:25 left to make it a two-point game at 41-39 on Lydia Gonzales' jumper with 6:51 showing.

Instead of folding up, though, the Cajuns went on an 11-0 run. Bratton hit a pair of free throws, Tiffany Washington nailed a three-pointer from the right wing and Blanche stripped UALR guard Rachel Smith and drove for a length-of-the-court layup with 5:34 left that made it 48-39.

The Cajun defense then recorded four straight stops, and Bratton's run-out layup off a Washington blocked shot made it 52-39 with 1:53 left and officially launched the celebration.

"We did it with defense and rebounding," said Hall. "That's what wins championships. We held them to 47 points and 28 percent shooting. They (UALR) were going to make it a defensive game, and we needed someone to step up big."

The Trojans packed their zone most of the evening and surrounded Petrakova, the Sun Belt's reigning Player of the Year. She finished with nine points off only five shots, but several times was able to find open teammates.

"They focused on Anna," said Bratton. "Every time she caught it they had three people backed down on her. That opened things up for the rest of us, and I knew once I hit that first shot that I had it going."

Bratton had nine of the Cajuns' first 11 points including a driving layup for an 11-3 lead six minutes into the game. Petrakova's first shot, a baseline jumper, made it 13-3 moments later after UALR hit only one of its first nine shots.

"We're a better shooting team than we showed tonight," said Trojan coach Joe Foley. "But we're playing a lot of freshmen and they play a lot better when we're at home. On the road, offense has really been our weakness."

The Trojans did have Alicia Cash to make up for some of those weaknesses, with the senior forward scoring UALR's final eight points of the half and 13 in the first half. The rest of her team had only five points in the first half, but because of Cash the visitors were within 23-18 at intermission and 23-21 on Demetrice Preyer's three-pointer just after halftime.

The Cajuns responded with a 12-0 run with Blanche and Bratton each getting two baskets in that streak for a 35-21 advantage, and the UL defense held Cash to only four points in the second half and none in the last 12 minutes.

UALR wouldn't go away and had an 18-6 run of its own midway through the half, and back-to-back baskets by Gonzales made it 41-39 at the 6:51 mark.

"We knew it was a game of runs," Tolston said. "It was time to get ours."

A few minutes later, that's just what they did.


University of Louisiana head coach J. Kelley Hall cuts down the net in celebration after the Ragin' Cajun women's basketball team won the school's first-ever Sun Belt Conference West Division championship.