ATHENS, TX — The third-ranked South Plains College women's basketball team suffered their first loss of the season Wednesday evening, falling to No. 1 Trinity Valley 72-53 at the Cardinal Gymnasium.

The Lady Texans will look to bounce back on Thursday when they travel to Kilgore College to take on the Lady Rangers at 5 p.m. The game will stream live at spctexans.com.

"We got off to a bad start and played poorly defensively," South Plains head coach Ara Baten said. "We were not prepared offensively for the pressure and had a tough first half. We came back in the second half and competed and got it to a manageable number late in the third and early in the fourth quarter, but we couldn't get over the hump and just couldn't get it back to where we had a chance to win."  

Trailing 35-14 at the midway point the Lady Texans fired back to begin the second half, outscoring Trinity Valley 25-16 in the third quarter to get within 12 heading into the final stint. The Lady Texans would cut the deficit to 10, 56-46 with 7:01 to play, but a 12-7 run from the Lady Cardinals over the next six minutes would be enough to seal the contest.

"Execution got a little bit better in the second half and we stopped turning the ball over," Baten said. "We had some good minutes where we were able to score inside and outside, and those were all positives. The reason we play games like this is to expose our areas of weakness. Playing against competition like this will always expose areas of weakness, and it did tonight. We have things we need to improve and I have to improve on. It's hard to lose a game like that, but if it helps us grow and get better down the road it's a good experience for us."

Freshman Debora Reis scored in double figures for the third consecutive game for the Lady Texans, netting 12 points, eight coming in the second half. Jordan Brown dropped in 10 points for South Plains, while Viktoria Ivanova had eight points and Grace Hunter finished with seven points.