The Troy women’s basketball team secured its seventh consecutive Sun Belt Conference win with an 84-73 victory over South Alabama on Wednesday night at Trojan Arena. The Trojans now hold a half-game lead for first place in the conference standings and have guaranteed themselves a top-five seed in the upcoming tournament. South Alabama, meanwhile, has lost ten straight games and will be seeded in the bottom five.
Emani Jenkins led Troy early, scoring 17 points in the first half—including five three-pointers—and finishing with 18 points and three steals. Fortuna Ngnawo and Zay Dyer both recorded double-doubles, maintaining their positions as the top two players in the conference for that statistic. Ngnawo had 16 points and 18 rebounds, while Dyer added 16 points and 10 rebounds; together they also contributed five blocks. Ashley Baez provided all-around support with 14 points and eight assists.
Troy shot efficiently from long range, making 11 of their 27 three-point attempts (40.7 percent), while holding South Alabama to just five made threes on 27 tries (18.5 percent).
South Alabama saw balanced scoring from Tamara Ortiz, Diawna Carter-Hartley, Amyah Sutton (each with 12 points), Daniela Gonzalez (10), and Alicia Spann (10). Both Gonzalez and Carter-Hartley finished with double-doubles by adding double-digit rebounds. However, South Alabama struggled in the first half, shooting only 26.3 percent from the field.
The game started with Troy building an early lead behind Jenkins’ shooting. By the end of the first quarter, Troy led by fifteen after an 11-0 run capped by Jenkins’ buzzer-beating three-pointer. The Trojans maintained control through halftime, leading by twenty after a strong finish to the second quarter.
A third-quarter surge pushed Troy’s advantage to as much as twenty-eight points before South Alabama mounted a fourth-quarter rally that narrowed the gap to single digits late in the game. Free throws from Ngnawo and Dyer helped Troy reestablish a comfortable margin before closing out the win.
Afterward, head coach Chanda Rigby said: “We are in the final stretch, marching toward a conference championship. We are tied for first, and every game is getting harder in some respect. It’s one thing to get into first place, but it’s harder to stay there, and that’s what we’re experiencing right now. We had a good first half. Our word for this game was ‘sharp.’ We wanted to be sharp — not just strive to win, but strive to be sharp in everything we did. I thought in many ways we were sharp in the first half. In the second half, we were not, and I think we got outplayed. Credit to South Alabama for that, but when we build a big lead, for one reason or another, teams always come back on us. We’ve been fortunate that we haven’t lost a conference game because of it yet, but we have to figure out what’s causing that and discontinue that behavior.”
Rigby continued: “We have one final game Saturday, our last in Trojan Arena. The seniors will be recognized. Many of them were here a few years ago when we reached the semifinals of the WNIT. The next year, they advanced to the championship game, and right now they’re in first place in the Sun Belt. I hope people will come out, show them a good farewell and support us.”
Troy will close its four-game homestand on Saturday against Southern Miss during senior day celebrations.
Additional notes from Wednesday’s contest include Emani Jenkins hitting four threes in the opening quarter—her seventeenth game this season with at least three made threes—and recording her fifth game with five or more made threes by halftime; Fortuna Ngnawo tallied her fifteenth double-double over her last nineteen games; Zay Dyer achieved her nineteenth double-double of this season; Ashley Baez recorded her seventh outing with at least five assists; Troy improved its record under Coach Rigby to 51-8 when making ten or more threes; and Wednesday’s result marked eleven straight home wins over South Alabama for Troy.



