By Dave Johnson
W&M Athletics
Going against the first-place team on the road is daunting enough. Doing it without your second-leading scorer and floor general only makes it worse.
William & Mary faced that dilemma Friday night in Philadelphia, and the result was a 63-43 loss at Drexel. Missing senior guard Sydney Wagner, who was out with health and safety protocol, the Tribe shot 38.5% and trailed wire-to-wire.
Wagner's absence left the other half of W&M's one-two punch, guard Riley Casey, to carry the load. She was held to a season-low four points on 2-of-12 shooting. Dani McTeer and Kate Sramac led the Tribe with nine points each.
"Drexel is a championship team, and we knew they'd press us because we're short a ball-handler," W&M coach Ed Swanson said. "And we knew they'd make things really, really hard on Riley (Casey). We didn't have anybody else on the offensive side really step up.
"We had opportunities to finish shots at the rim and some open shots. But we got beat on the glass (35-24) and outhustled on 50-50 balls. Things that we needed to control to beat a championship team on their home floor we didn't get done tonight."
Drexel (22-3, 14-1), which has a one-lead over Delaware atop the CAA standings, shot 11-of-13 from the floor in the first quarter. W&M tightened it up on defense by holding the Dragons to 37% in the final three periods.
The Tribe trailed by 15 points at halftime, but McTeer's layup cut Drexel's lead to 39-28 with 6:07 left in the third quarter. The Dragons closed with a 16-0 run to make it 55-28 going into the fourth quarter. Seven of those points came following offensive rebounds.
"That's probably the most disappointed I've been all conference season," Swanson said. "They missed, and we gave up second and third shots. That's demoralizing to a team when you're not finishing the play off defensively. I think we hung our heads a little bit at when we saw it getting away from us.
"We had made a little bit of a run and we were playing with some hop in our step, and we gave up too many offensive boards. And they put the game away."
Coming into the game, Casey and Wagner were combining for nearly 30 of the Tribe's 59.3 points a game. But they're a tandem, and W&M is 1-5 without both of them in the lineup.
"They lean on each other," Swanson said. "It puts the other player at ease because they don't have the pressure of having to score as much. We needed some other players.
"Ruthie Montella played tonight, but she's not 100 percent. And we don't' have that inside presence on a consistent basis that we need."
The Tribe will be without Wagner in Sunday afternoon's game at Delaware (19-6, 13-2). The Blue Hens defeated W&M 70-56 last month in Williamsburg in what was a six-point game going into the fourth quarter.
"It'll be another one that we're going to have to find a way to score the ball," Swanson said. "And if we're going to go to Delaware and pull out a victory against another championship-level team, we've got to really be good on the defensive side. We've got to defend and rebound."
