A career-best per­for­mance by Jes­sica Law­son — 33 points and 10 rebounds to go along with three steals and two blocked shots — wasn’t enough for the Uni­ver­sity of South Florida’s women’s bas­ket­ball team from avoid­ing a dis­ap­point­ing 60–52 loss against the Rut­gers Scar­let Knights Sat­ur­day after­noon at the USF Sun Dome.

The Bulls, hop­ing to extend a two-game win­ning streak against Big East rivals Cincin­nati and Vil­lanova, started off the game with an obvi­ous feroc­ity, scor­ing 14 of the first 17 points scored in the con­test, and tak­ing as much as an 11 point lead with 13:19 remain­ing in the first half.

Rut­gers, how­ever, show­ing its refusal to con­cede a loss so early in the game, then outscored USF in an impres­sive 17–9 run, and cut­ting the Bulls lead to just three at intermission.

The Bulls appeared to regroup at the begin­ning of the sec­ond period, extend­ing its lead to as much as four points within the first four min­utes of the half.  Yet Rut­gers proved tena­cious, and keep­ing the con­test frus­trat­ingly close, ended up finally tak­ing over the lead, 36–35, at the 10:01 left, when the Scar­let Knights guard Khadi­jah Rush­dan scored on a lay up.

From that point for­ward, Rut­gers would yield no more than a two point lead to its oppo­nent (45–43 with 5:47 left in the game), but build­ing on a strong eight-of-10 shoot­ing from the free throw line dur­ing the last 54 sec­onds of the game, even­tu­ally pulled away from USF and put the game out of reach of the now 13–9 Bulls.

Rut­gers, led by Kashdan’s team-high 17 points, now moves to 13–10 on the sea­son, this despite shoot­ing just 38.3 per­cent from the field (18–47) and hit­ting a mere one of five from three points.

Mean­while, USF pre­pares for a three-game road series that begins Feb­ru­ary 9 against Mar­quette, then moves on to Seton Hall on Feb­ru­ary 13 and George­town on Feb­ru­ary 17.

Law­son, as usual, proved the Bulls pri­mary offen­sive weapon in Saturday’s loss, post­ing her 12th double-double of the 2009–2010 sea­son against Rut­gers and her fifth straight in Big East action.  The sixth-year senior now has 22 double-doubles in her time at the Uni­ver­sity of South Florida and has a total of 23 includ­ing her time spent at the Uni­ver­sity of California.

What fol­lows is a photo jour­nal of Saturday’s game as pro­vided by Jason Roberts of PRISM Press Group.  As always, all mate­r­ial included in this post remains the sole prop­erty of Jason and PRISM PRress Group and may not be repro­duced with­out explicit per­mis­sion, obtain­able by email­ing jason@prismpressgroup.org. More >