CLEVELAND – Bowling Green had no answer for Central Michigan’s Crystal Bradford Friday afternoon in
Quicken Loans Arena.
A freshman, Bradford scored seven of CMU’s final nine points in the game and had an assist on the other
basket as the Chippewas held on for a 69-66 victory in the Mid-American Conference tournament
semifinals.
“Crystal Bradford’s name is all over the stat sheet in the final minutes and she really, really took over
the game,” said BG head coach Curt Miller.
Central Michigan, 20-14, advances to Saturday’s title game against Eastern Michigan. Bowling Green, 24-6,
has a berth in the WNIT for winning the MAC regular season title. The Falcons will find out Monday if
they get a home game for the first-round of the WNIT.
“We’ll go to our eighth straight post-season. We’re not done,” Miller said. “This team has to regroup and
realize what a privilege it is to be in post-season and we have a legacy.
“We hope that Thursday is home in the WNIT and we can break a record for home wins in a season.”
Bradford, who did not start, played 31 minutes and scored 20 points and added 12 rebounds and eight
assists. She had two blocked shots and a steal, with the steal leading to CMU’s final basket.
“It was a very composed performance by ‘CB’ today,” said CMU head coach Sue Guevara.
Bradford’s second-half effort was in sharp contrast to her first-half play. She was 1-of-7 from the field
in the first half with six rebounds and four assists. She improved her shooting to 8-of-12 in the second
half with the same number of rebounds and assists.
“I just had ice in my veins,” Bradford said. “I didn’t want to go home and knew my team didn’t want to
either.
“It wasn’t by design,” Bradford added about her late game play, “Our coach said that if we attack it
would open right up and it happened to open up for me so I took the shot.”
Still the Falcons made a game of it, but could not get the key basket or the key stop in the late going.

BG trailed by 11 midway through the second half, but battled back to close to within one, three times in
the final minutes.
After Jessica Slagle’s two free throws cut CMU’s lead to 60-59 with 2:08 left, Bradford converted a
three-point play when she was fouled on a drive to the basket.
Chrissy Steffen’s 3-pointer with 1:22 remaining pulled the Falcons to within 63-62. Bradford then scored
with 1:09 left.
Bowling Green answered with a layup from Alexis Rogers with 52.6 seconds left, pulling BG to within one,
65-64, for the final times in the game.
Bradford made a layup with 34.3 seconds left and then got the steal on a poor pass and found Jessica
Green for a layup.
Slagle layup with two seconds left closed out the scoring
“I’m proud that we fought. We could have gone away and lost by 20,” Miller said. “We really, really
fought and gave ourselves a chance down the stretch.”
One of the major problems for the Falcons came in the final 10 minutes of the first half. BG held a 21-15
lead with 10:09 left in the first half. The Chippewas closed the half on a 14-5 run, with all five of
BG’s points coming on free throws.
With Slagle on the bench with two fouls, the Falcons had eight turnovers in the final 10 minutes of the
second half and were 0-of-11 from the field, including 0-of-6 on 3-pointers
“We just froze. We didn’t move; we didn’t have good ball movement. We didn’t drive into the gaps,”
Steffen said about BG’s late first-half offense.
Guevara said CMU played a zone to take away BG’s inside game and make the Falcons shot the 3-pointer.
“Bowling Green hasn’t been shooting the 3-ball like they have in the past,” Guevara said. “They have done
a nice job of penetrating, getting into the paint and getting it into Rogers.
“I thought our zone did a really good job,” she added.
Rogers said she was getting double-teamed a lot and “I couldn’t really turn (into the) middle.”
Bowling Green did improve its shooting in the second half, making 15-of-35 (42.9 percent), including
5-of-11 on threes, but could not figure out Bradford.
Bowling Green had done a good job in conference play of rebounding and playing defense. Only three times
in MAC games, did a team score more than 60 points against the Falcons and twice it was Central
Michigan.
“You have to give a lot of credit to Central for making tough plays, for making baskets on 1-on-1 plays
in their dribble-drive offense,” Miller said.