Monday, Jan. 12, 2004 | 9:56 a.m.
If the Lady Rebels were looking for a challenge before the start of the Mountain West Conference season, they found it. And they won.
That about takes care of the good stuff from a 67-60 victory against Northern Arizona at Cox Pavilion Sunday afternoon.
"They definitely wanted it more than we did," said Sherry McCracklin, who helped UNLV (11-2) win its sixth consecutive game with a 22-point, 13-rebound effort against the spunky Lumberjacks (6-6) of the Big Sky Conference. "And then we kind of gave it to them."
For a while, anyway. But then she and RanDee Henry took it back. Henry was just as good as McCracklin, scoring 25 points, including 14-of-16 from the free-throw line, and pulling down 10 rebounds.
Between them, McCracklin and Henry accounted for 47 of the Lady Rebels' 67 points, including 20 of their first 21, and 23 of their 43 rebounds.
It would have been a crime to lose to NAU, but McCracklin and Henry, the Lady Rebels' dynamic duo, wouldn't let it happen.
"I'll take that any day, because I want to play an ever bigger role," said McCracklin, the nation's second-leading rebounder. "But in the first half, some of the others didn't perform their roles. That put more pressure on me and RanDee."
Sheena Moore finally came alive in the second half to finish with 10 points, including a big basket off a hard drive to the hoop that gave UNLV a 59-54 lead with 3:20 to play. But in that Moore was coming off a 26-point performance in a victory at St. Mary's last week, the Lady Rebels probably were expecting a little more from their point guard.
Their coach certainly was.
"I'll put our Big 3 against anybody's (top three)," UNLV coach Regina Miller said. "But she didn't take one shot in the first half. There's no way one of our Big 3 should go a whole half without shooting.
"That's what I told her at halftime and she came out more aggressive in the second half."
The efforts of McCracklin, Henry and Moore notwithstanding, the game was even closer than the final score. NAU, which played Brigham Young of the Mountain West to a 58-52 loss in Flagstaff on Saturday night, had three chances to tie the game with a 3-pointer during the final two minutes but came up empty.
"It was a scare," Miller said. "We almost needed one of these to wake up."
Curiously, the game was the Lady Rebels' first all year to be decided by single digits. Prior to Sunday, UNLV's closest game was a 10-point loss at UCLA in the second game of the season.
But the NAU game probably shouldn't have been close, either. The Lady Rebels shot out to a 24-12 lead and also led by a dozen in the second half at 46-34, after NAU had clawed into a 30-30 halftime tie.
UNLV played well at the start of both halves but just good enough to get by after that. The Lady Rebels barely outrebounded much smaller NAU (43-39) and committed 20 turnovers, although only seven of those came after halftime.
"We wanted to play uptempo and at the beginning of the game we pinched them with our press," Miller said. "But we didn't commit to the game plan. We let them dictate the pace and once they got us in a half-court game, they ran us through about a thousand screens.
"But you're going to have some of these, where you have to win ugly as well. Today we won ugly."
McCracklin agreed, but said the Lady Rebels want to get back to playing pretty basketball starting Saturday with the Mountain West opener against San Diego State at the Cox.
"If we play like this, conference is gonna be way harder for us," she said.
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