On Sunday, the women’s basketball team (6-3) took a resounding 90-35 victory over Johnson & Wales University (2-4, 1-0 Great Northeast) at the Pizzitola Sports Center. Led by career-high scoring performances from Alyssa Moreland ’26 and Olivia Young ’27, the Bears extended their winning streak to four games.
The team is “playing really confidently,” Head Coach Monique LeBlanc said after the game. “As a coach, we want to pump them full of as much confidence as we can. The real magic is when they have confidence in themselves. (The team) really trusts how hard they’re playing, and from an identity standpoint, those are the types of teams that I love to coach.”
Bruno’s 90 points were the most they’ve scored in a single game since defeating Mitchell College 101-45 last December.
The Bears started the game aggressively, winning the opening tip and driving down the court. After buying time with their passing game, Ada Anamekwe ’26 found Moreland, who had broken free from her defender, under the hoop. Boxing out the JWU defender, she scored the first points of the game — the first basket of her 15-point performance. Throughout the rest of the game, Bruno owned the paint, where they outscored the Wildcats 44-6.
Aided by dominant performances inside the three-point line, Brown was able to establish its distance game early on. A few minutes later, after rebounding the ball underneath the opponent’s backboard, Moreland — who recorded her first career double-double — found Isabella Mauricio ’25, who knocked it down from three.
Up 10-0, Brown continued to score from beyond the arc, with Mauricio and Young scoring back-to-back triples. The Bears’ five first-quarter three-point shots helped them go on a 20-0 run to open the game.
According to Moreland, a strong defensive performance set the stage for the Bears’ offensive success. “We had great intensity. We had a lot of turnovers, a lot of fastbreaks,” she said. “And even if it wasn’t turnovers, our rebounding rate was really high.”
“Getting rebounds, pushing in transition and turning (turnovers) into buckets” is what ultimately helped propel the Bears to a 26-7 first-quarter lead, she explained.
In the second quarter, Bruno pulled even further ahead. On the defensive side, they kept the paint clean, contesting the ball and preventing the Wildcats from getting off clean shots, allowing only a single field goal in the period. On the offensive side, the Bears made 53% of their shots in the quarter, going into halftime up 49-13.
“We came out with full intensity,” Young said. “We came out giving everything we could give and it allowed us to score big for each quarter. Besides (today), we haven’t been shooting as well, so this game gave us a lot of confidence and that will help us continue shooting better in the future.”
Coming out of halftime, the Bears continued their unrelenting attack. In a play that was representative of the entire game, Young intercepted a JWU inbound pass. Playing the ball down the court, she found Moreland in full stride for a layup.
Over the course of the game, Bruno forced 22 turnovers on the defensive end. On offense, they flipped the court efficiently, scoring 33 points off of turnovers. JWU’s attempts at a comeback were futile: For every point they scored, the Bears scored at least two, pulling ahead 67-21 by the start of the fourth quarter. By the end of the game, Brown reached a game-high 55-point lead to secure a 90-35 victory.
The feeling in the locker room was “really good” after the game, Young said. “We’re happy we could score a lot of points — everybody on the team scored.”
“It’s definitely given us a lot of confidence for our next game against (the University of Massachusetts) Lowell,” Young added. The Bears are set to take on UMass Lowell at the Pizzitola Sports Center on Tuesday at 7 p.m.
Lydell Dyer is a Senior Staff Writer for the sports section. A sophomore hailing from Bonn, Germany, Lydell is studying nonfiction English and political science, and if he's not off "making words sound pretty," you can find him lifting heavy circles at the Nelson.
