The Utah women’s basketball team found a rhythm Wednesday night, defeating Kansas 79-61.
The Utes are now 14-5 on the season and 5-3 in Big 12 play. With a favorable remaining schedule and Kennady McQueen recovering from injury, things are trending up for Gavin Petersen’s team.
The headline of the game was Gianna Kneepkens. Her career-high 30-point performance boosted the Utes to victory over the Jayhawks, and if the 30 points weren’t impressive enough, Kneepkens added 10 rebounds and eight assists to her stat sheet.
“I have to give credit to my teammates for finding me. In the coverage tonight I was just trying to find the gaps and my teammates found me every time,” Kneepkens said. “We were prepared super well so I was able to find passes to my teammates they were able to finish. It was a team effort and with our focus on starting super well we were all able to connect the full 40 minutes.”
Kneepkens wasn’t the only Ute flirting with a triple-double against the Jayhawks. Senior forward Jenna Johnson filled the stat sheet with 13 points, nine rebounds and seven assists. A recently struggling Johnson seems like she may have found the recipe for success in conference play.
“I was focusing on being aggressive tonight. That’s something I’ve felt I have been missing these last few games. I tried to go in with that mentality,” Johnson said. “I also tried to control the controllables with rebounding and I found a groove in the o-boards early on and just rolled with it from there.”
Overall, it was a dominant performance for the Utes on Wednesday at the Jon M. Huntsman Center. 27 assists on 30 made field goals is no easy task, but Utah earned the accomplishment en route to a bounce-back victory.
Coach Petersen was proud of the strong performance, saying, “It was a good start for our team this time around. We’ve had a few games where we haven’t had good starts that have put us behind, and we’ve had to waste a lot of energy to just make it a good game. I’m proud of our focus the last couple of days, in terms of executing what we needed to do to start a game and that allows us to play freely.”
