VU women get defensive vs. Davidson

It took time Friday for Vanderbilt’s women’s basketball team to find its best defense. Once it did, it also rediscovered its offense.

The 17th-ranked Commodores forced 33 turnovers, which led to nearly half of their points in an 82-50 victory over Davidson on the first day of the Vanderbilt Thanksgiving Classic at Memorial Gymnasium.

“We changed the game by playing straight man(-to-man) and getting up and pressuring and trapping,” coach Melanie Balcomb said. “… They were hurting our matchup (zone) and our presses.

“Until we got some defensive stops and … clearing rebounds or steals, then you can’t in transition. We wanted to get in transition more to open the game up and get the tempo going.”

VU’s first two baskets, by Christina Wirth and Hannah Tuomi, respectively, both came on fastbreaks. Yet it was not until Wirth scored seven unanswered points, including two 3-pointers, and turned a two-point lead into a nine-point cushion (26-17) that the Commodores finally pulled away to stay,

Tuomi finished with 16 points, and Wirth added 14 as VU nearly doubled its all-time low point total (42) set in a loss Sunday at Michigan.

Merideth Marsh contributed 10 points, and three others finished with eight.

“It was a long time between games, which, I think, was a good thing because we fixed a lot of things,” Wirth said. “Mostly we talked about our mentality and how it shouldn’t even matter how a team plays us if we’re in attack mode the whole game.”

Vanderbilt (5-1) ultimately scored 40 points off turnovers and 18 on fastbreaks. Its field goal percentage (49.2) was its second-best of the season, and the turnovers forced were a season-high.

Davidson (1-4) was good when it did shoot as it made 45 percent of its 40 attempts. The Wildcats did not manage a second-half field goal attempt until 4:07 after the intermission, however, and they collected just six offensive rebounds for the game, none in the first half.

“We really wanted to have a much more aggressive mentality,” Balcomb said. “We worked really hard this week and really pushed people to their limits. We didn’t have any fight-back, we felt, against Michigan. So we worked on our fight and our mentality.

“… The second half, really, we came out with that mentality. We were still a little hesitant (at the start).”

Briefly: Wirth became the 22nd player in program history to top 1,100 career points. She raised her total to 1,101, three behind Mara Cunningham, who played from 1993-96. In so doing she passed Dee Davis (1,092) and Ashley McElhiney (1,093). … Freshman forward Jordan Coleman played for the first time and had three points and one rebound in nine minutes. She missed the first five games with a stress fracture. … The Commodores have not lost consecutive games since Feb. 12 and 19, 2006 (at Tennessee and versus Georgia), a stretch of 80 games. … Vanderbilt will play in the championship game of the tournament 4:15 p.m. Saturday. The consolation game will start at 2 p.m.