Fennelly's outburst provides spark

AMES - Iowa State Coach Bill Fennelly called it stupid.

His players deemed it a call to action.

Fennelly drew a technical foul with 2:33 left in the first half of Wednesday night's Cy-Hawk Series game against Iowa and it seemed to spur an ISU revival that ended in a 62-54 win before 12,662 fans at Hilton Coliseum.

But Fennelly shook his head when asked about it.

“I don't believe technical fouls motivate teams,” said the Cyclone coach, whose team began a 19-3 run 42 seconds after the ‘T' came and did not trail again. “I'm Irish and that's my personality. It's not good at times.”

ISU guard Lauren Mansfield is Australian and found Fennelly's fiery tirade uplifting, not misguided.

“Just seeing coach Fen's emotion and him fighting for us is an amazing feeling,” said Mansfield, who started the 19-3 run and scored a team-high 15 points. “Then the crowd gets into it. I looked around to all my teammates and they were so ready.”

Before the technical, the Hawkeyes struck for an 18-2 splurge that made the score 27-18.

Iowa led 27-20 before the Cyclones' Nikki Moody drained a 3-pointer with five seconds left.

Then the Hawkeyes turned the ball over and Hallie Christofferson converted a 3-point play off Moody's long inbounds pass, making the score 27-26 at halftime.

“They outworked us,” said Iowa Coach Lisa Bluder, whose team committed 22 turnovers and battled foul trouble most of the night. “We had too many turnovers to have a chance to win the game.”

ISU (5-2) beat the Hawks (5-4) for the fifth time in the past seven meetings.

It was the closest game in the series since the Cyclones earned a 60-54 triumph Nov. 30, 2006, at Carver-Hawkeye Arena.

“I told the kids before the game this is not like every other game,” said Fennelly, whose team overcame 34 percent shooting while limiting Iowa to 30 percent. “Coach-speak as that is, it's not to our fans, it's not to our players, it's not to our coaches.”

Jaime Printy, the Hawks' leading scorer, played just 24 minutes before fouling out for the first time this season with 4:50 remaining.

She finished with nine points - half her season average.

“There were just so many whistles, so many fouls out there that it was hard to get into a flow,” Printy said.

Morgan Johnson, who fouled out with 2:01 left, led Iowa with 16 points.

She said she could sense the momentum shift as ISU started its decisive run.

“It's something that's happened in a game like this,” Johnson said. “The crowd gets into it and they start to feel it.”

Fennelly had something to do with that.

“Stupid” or not.

“As soon as he got (the technical) our motto was, ‘If he's fighting for us, we're going to fight for him,'” said ISU forward Brynn Williamson, who scored 11 points off the bench - including three of her team's seven 3-pointers. “He can say it doesn't motivate us, but it sparked something.”

ISU post player Chelsea Poppens went down with an apparent knee injury late in the game and had to be helped off the court, but Fennelly said the initial report is she'll be fine. Poppens scored 10 points and had a team-high nine rebounds.

[nggallery id=721]