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Senior guard Karee Houlette

A couple clutch shots by freshman guard Rubylee Wright and a rare triple-technical foul on Cincinnati in the final minute propelled Georgetown to a 69-61 victory on Wednesday. The win snaps a four-game skid for the Hoyas (14-10, 4-7), while the defeat extends Cincinnati’s (13-10, 3-7) losing streak to six games.

“The games we lost were so close,” Head Coach Terri Williams-Flournoy said. “You can’t just keep staying close, fighting and staying close, keep fighting. We needed to show that [the players] were working hard for a reason.”

It didn’t hurt that the Hoyas were finally back at full strength. Senior guard Karee Houlette, Georgetown’s leading scorer with 10.2 points per game, posted a team-high of 19 points after sitting out the previous two contests with an injured ankle.

“Being back in general is lovely; I’m tired of being in the training room,” Houlette said. “It’s nice to get a W.”

Georgetown rode its sharp shooting to an early lead, as 5-for-10 shooting from long range helped the Hoyas build a 21-13 advantage. A three-pointer from junior guard Shanice Fuller gave Georgetown its largest lead of the game, 37-26, with 3:41 left in the first half; and after a quiet final minutes, the Hoyas led at the break by the score of 36-29.

Sophomore guard Monica McNutt scored all of her 12 points in the first half on 4-for-5 shooting, all from behind the arc. As a team, the Hoyas shot 46.7 percent from the floor in the first half and drained 7-of-16 three-pointers.

Junior guard Kahla Roudebush paced the Bearcats with 14 in the first half. Cincinnati nearly kept up with Georgetown’s hot shooting, making 12-of-26 from the field and 5-of-14 from beyond the arc. The Bearcats struggled, however, against the Hoyas’ swarming defense, which recorded eight steals in the first half and took Cincinnati out of its rhythm. Neither team attacked the lane particularly hard, often settling for outside jumpers. At the break, the two teams had combined for only seven fouls, and no individual had recorded more than one.

The Hoyas’ willingness to keep taking outside looks hurt them for much of the second half, when the open threes weren’t falling. Georgetown made only one of its first eight outside shots as Cincinnati rallied to take a 50-48 lead with just over eight minutes remaining. But then Houlette made consecutive treys to give the Hoyas a 54-50 advantage and slow down the Bearcats’ momentum.

Cincinnati tied the game up at 56 several minutes later before Wright gave Georgetown the lead for good. The freshman point guard knocked down a deep three-pointer that got the McDonough Gymnasium crowd excited. Then freshman guard Adria Crawford got a steal on the next defensive possession and pushed the ball ahead to Wright, who spun in the lane before making an acrobatic layup that gave Georgetown a five-point cushion.

“She’s just a gamer,” Williams-Flournoy said of Wright. “She wants to be in, she wants to take the big shots. And she, she came in and just made some big plays for us.”

Trailing 63-59 with 41 seconds left, Cincinnati’s Morgan Angel initiated a bizarre sequence that effectively ended any hopes for a Bearcat comeback. The senior drove into a crowded lane and went up for a layup. The shot fell, but Angel was called for a charge with which both she and Cincinnati Head Coach J. Kelley Hall disagreed. Angel was called for one technical foul and Hall received a pair, getting him ejected. Houlette went to the line for six free throws and made five, putting Georgetown up by nine with possession, more than enough to secure the victory.

Unlike Georgetown, which several times substituted the entire lineup out and had no player log more than 30 minutes, Cincinnati exhibited very little depth. Three Bearcat starters played the entire game, and Cincinnati only got 18 minutes and two points from three players off the bench. Georgetown’s eight substitutes scored 22 points in 102 combined minutes.

The win moves Georgetown up to 10th in the Big East heading into Saturday’s visit to Providence (9-14, 3-7), and the Cincinnati victory has the Hoyas full of confidence.

“Our coach told us, [Assistant] Coach Brown told us that this is the one we needed,” McNutt said. “We needed to get one and then we’ll get on a roll for the rest of the season, so we believe it. That’s what we need to do.”

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