January 13, 2012 - 8:34am
Full Court's Southeastern Conference Game of the Week lived up to expectations.
And rising star A'dia Mathies did too.
Mathies played more minutes (36) and scored more points (34, a career high, with nine rebounds) than anyone else. After the Lady Vols had come back from more than than a dozen down in the final eight minutes of the game, to take a three-point lead with a minute-and-a-half to go, it was Mathies who rebounded her own miss and dropped it in to cut the gap to one with 46 seconds left.
The ferocious Wildcat defense stood tough during the subsequent Tennessee possession, which ended 18 seconds later, when Shekinna Stricklen was called for a charge, turning the ball back over to the home team with 28 ticks left on the clock.
And after a time out, it was once again Mathies who drove the lane, cutting through a pair of Lady Vols defenders to score her final basket, the game-winner, with five seconds left as the Kentucky Wildcats put a magnificent stamp on their early season, outlasting visiting Tennessee, 61-60, on Thursday night, Jan. 12 in Lexington, Kentucky's Memorial Coliseum.
The win snapped Tennessees 36-game winning streak in conference play and puts the Wildcats atop the conference standings for the time being, alongside LSU, as one of the two remaining undefeated SEC teams in conference play.
But even more importantly, it signals an announcement that Kentucky has returned to stay in the Top 10 of womens college basketball.
