Women’s basketball head coach Kristy Curry celebrated her 500th career win Monday night in a 74-66 comeback win against Vanderbilt.
Curry, who’s been with the Crimson Tide since 2013, declined to let the attention stay on her, despite being happy about the win, without acknowledging her team’s efforts.
“It’s not necessarily about me, but I do feel like one thing in our program that we talk a lot about is just grit, that you can be the hardest worker in the room, the most competitive in the room,” Curry said. “I thought in the third and the fourth quarter, we were just that. So, the way we won tonight down the stretch says a lot about this team and their makeup from a character standpoint.”
Going into the third quarter, Alabama was down by 9, and this number only grew as Vanderbilt guard Jordyn Oliver made another 2 points off a turnover. But then Alabama slowly started to mount its comeback, with guards Sarah Ashlee Barker and Aaliyah Nye leading the charge after a tough realization during halftime.
“It was about coming into halftime and realizing that we weren’t playing the way we needed to play,” Barker said. “The coaches demanded we give more effort and understand that it’s going to be a game of runs and that the third quarter we weren’t going to just turn around and just take the lead. And we knew that we were going to kind of have to climb into it every single minute of the game. And so that’s what we did. We just stuck with it.”
Nye and Barker contributed 47 points in the game, with Barker scoring 24 and Nye 23. This is Barker’s third game in a row with more than 20 points and Nye’s highest 3-pointer percentage of the season at 83.3%. Alongside this duo, guard Loyal McQueen also dominated the court with 16 points.
“They’re really double trouble in a good way, and they’re such a great tandem, and they play off each other,” Curry said of Nye and Barker. “I thought Loyal had one of her best games of the year. Just everything that she did tonight, I know the 16 points, she just did so many things and situations that may go unrecognized, and I thought the three of them, they’re our leadership committee.”
As the time wound down and the fourth quarter set off, Alabama was still trailing behind Vanderbilt by 6, and a layup by Vanderbilt forward Sacha Washington left the Crimson Tide at even more of a disadvantage, bringing the gap to 8.
Two free throws from McQueen proved to be all the team needed to get the ball rolling on a 16-3 scoring run, leaving it ahead of Vanderbilt by 6 points with only five minutes left in the game.
With five more free throws, a layup from forward Essence Cody and two more 3-pointers by Nye, the Crimson Tide continued to cement its lead. McQueen took one more free throw to end the game at 74-66.
Despite the game being make-or-break for the Crimson Tide, Nye knew the one thing the team had to do to make it to the end: “Trust what the coaches tell us to do and just execute.” Barker echoed her sentiments, saying it was just that simple: The coaches and players needed to believe in one another to make the win possible.
The team will return to Coleman Coliseum to get ready to welcome the Tennessee Volunteers on Thursday for the team’s Power of Pink night. Tipoff is set for 6 p.m. CT, and the game can be streamed on the SEC Network.
