THUNDER BAY – A sluggish start wasn’t how Jon Kreiner wanted his team to emerge from the Florida sun.
But thanks to the hot shooting hand of guard Nikki Ylagan and an 11th straight double-double from import forward Leasjha Grant, his Lakehead Thunderwolves returned to the win column on Friday night, hanging on to edge the visiting Guelph Gryphons 70-68 at the C.J. Sanders Fieldhouse.
Ylagan, the Wolves second-year guard, fired up four three-pointers and finished with 19 points, while Grant picked up steam in the second half, scoring three straight baskets to start the fourth to ignite the LU comeback bid.
Grant, who leads the OUA in scoring and rebounding, dropped 22 points on the Gryphons while hauling in 15 boards.
While Kreiner has come to expect that kind of performance from his Bahamian forward, it was Ylagan breaking free of her early-season struggles that caught his attention.
She’s hoping it leads to more of the same.
“In the first semester I wasn’t hitting a lot of shots. I knew that coming into the new year I had to get stronger. I had to knock down shots for big games like this,” the Mississauga native said.
“I had to stay locked in and focused.”
While Grant helped them pull away in the fourth, it was Ylagan who kept them close when the Gryphons (5-6) were threatening to pull away in the opening half.
She buried a pair of threes in the first and one more in the second, though the Wolves trailed 37-33 at the break.
“Nikki was definitely our go-to tonight,” Kreiner said, encouraged at his team’s depth, something he worried about when forwards Katelyn Andrea and August Ricketts went down with season-ending injuries in the first half.
“We have different people step up on different nights. Bridget (O’Reilly) really stepped up down in Florida. Lily (Gruber-Schulz) stepped up. Nikki’s had this one coming for a while and we’re happy it happened tonight.”
The win earned the Thunderwolves a share of second in the OUA West, deadlocked with McMaster (7-4) and Western (7-5).
It also helped restore the team’s confidence, after ending the first half of the season with losses against Toronto and Ryerson.
“I think it gives us a lot of confidence knowing we can play big games like this and hit big shots like Jerika (Baldin) did in the last quarter. It gives us confidence and hopefully it carries over to tomorrow,” Ylagan said.
Baldin, who struggled for much of the game, stepped back and drained a three-pointer with 38 seconds to go, after Guelph’s Ashely Wheeler and Blake Berchard scored back-to-back buckets to make it a one-possession game, LU leading 67-64.
The Gryphons kept pushing, Wheeler making it a two-point contest with seven seconds left, but Grant managed to escape her opponent’s grasp trying to steal the ball in the dying seconds of the game and ran the clock out.
The two teams tangle again on Saturday.
