History was made in more ways than one for the Hillsdale College women's basketball team Thursday night.
Senior forward Brittany Gray became the third member of this year's team to score her 1,000th career point in a 74-57 Charger victory over Ohio Valley University in West Virginia. The win, Hillsdale's sixth in a row, makes the team 14-11 overall and 12-9 in the Great Midwest Athletic Conference.
Gray hit that milestone during a game-turning 3-point barrage early in the fourth quarter. Her first of four consecutive made 3-point shots got her to the 1,000 mark. She would go on to drain three more in a row to help break open what had been a tighter-than-expected game.
Ohio Valley, now 0-25 on the season, was hitting on a good percentage of its 3-point shots and was lurking within 10 points, 53-43, at the end of the third quarter. But Gray's deadly shooting not only wrote her into the history books, but removed all doubt from the result of this game.
Some team history was also made in this contest. The Chargers were all over the boards, setting a new single-game, regulation school record with 64 rebounds as a team. Technically, that number ties a single-game mark set at Walsh on Feb. 1, 2014, but that game went four overtimes. So in the history of non-overtime women's basketball games at Hillsdale College, this went down as the most prolific rebounding game the team's ever had.
Sophomore guard Jaycie Burger set a career-high with 10 rebounds, all of them coming on the defensive end. Six different players had six or more rebounds in the game. Allie Dewire and Amaka Chikwe had seven apiece, while Lauren Daffenberg, Julia Wacker and Sydney Anderson all came off the bench to grab six rebounds each.
The Chargers led 17-6 at the end of the first quarter and expanded that slightly to 35-21 at halftime. But the Fighting Scots started making some threes of their own, and outscored Hillsdale 22-18 in the third quarter to make it a 10-point game. But an 11-2 run in the first two minutes of the quarter - thanks to Gray's barrage - took care of this one.
PHOTO: Todd Lancaster