Elizabeth Flynn's 18 points off the bench helped the St. Lawrence University women's basketball team to a 71-39 victory over Bard on Saturday afternoon.

The win gives the Saints an 8-4 conference record, tied with Rensselaer for fourth in the conference as they continue through their conference schedule.

"I loved our defensive execution all game!  We struggled with shooting to start the game but finished incredibly well," said Saints head coach Dan Roiger. "It was great to see our bench make significant contributions today, and it was also nice to see our team's reaction when our bench players scored. It was a nice week for Saints basketball!"

St. Lawrence waltzed out of the gate hot, going on a 7-0 run right away off two field goals from Hannah Van Dyke and an Izzy Caron jumper. Bard trimmed the lead to three shortly thereafter, with an Erin Tobes layup making it 8-5 Saints with five minutes remaining.

From there, the Saints dropped the next 16 points to build a monster 24-5 lead in the final minute of the quarter, with Jackie Malley posting five of those points. Alexis Mackenzie hit a big three with 44 seconds left to cap a run, and the Saints led 24-8 heading to the break.

The Raptors would then narrowly outscore the Saints in each of the next two quarters. They cut the Saints lead down to as little as 12 after coming out of the gate with 13 of the next 21 points of the contest. At halftime, the game's score was 37-24 St. Lawrence.

Bard began the third with a 9-0 run to cut the St. Lawrence lead down to four, with Lexi Miller kicking off the run via back-to-back layups. However, the Saints responded with the next six points to take a 10-point lead into the game's final quarter.

That's where things opened up offensively for the Scarlet and Brown. Stevie Bannon began the fourth with a layup 40 seconds in, then Flynn followed that up by posting nine straight points to put the Saints up 54-33 with 6:53 to play. St. Lawrence saw their bench record points late in the contest – Josie Cancro and Caelan McCormack, and Emily Wendt each sank triples. Wendt, KJ Greenhalgh, and Whitney Lewis added late field goals.



Flynn was the only Saint to hit double-figure scoring, but Malley, Mackenzie, and Bannon had nine, eight and seven points respectively to follow up the Saints' Mason Baker-Schlendering led the Saints with six rebounds. Caron added a team-high three steals.

After the Saints shot 2-15 from the floor in the third, they cleaned up their shooting in the back half of the second half and sunk nine of 12 field goal attempts. They shot 23-55 for 41.8 per cent from the floor over the course of the contest, to Bard's 28 per cent.

St. Lawrence now heads out of town for an extended stint of road contests, beginning at Ithaca on Friday, February 6 at 5:30 p.m, then to Rochester, N.Y. to face RIT on Saturday, February 7 at 2 p.m.