The women’s basketball team bounced back from a heartbreaking 72-71 loss Wednesday night to Stony Brook by hammering New Hampshire 70-44 on Saturday afternoon at Patrick Gym.UVM never trailed on the afternoon using an early 20-4 lead to grab a comfortable win.Behind lights-out 57.1 per-cetn shooting and strong de-fense, holding UNH to 29.2 percent shooting in the first half, the Catamounts snatched a 36-16 halftime lead.”Our defense was solid, and our pressure defense took away the shot clock, which helped cut down their oppor-tunities.” Head Coach Sharon Dawley commented after the win, “Today was all about de-fense and great team play; we had 20 assists on our 23 shots.”Vermont was lead by fresh-man Courtnay Pilypaitis and May Kotsopoulos who both scored 13 points on the after-noon. Pilypaitis added seven rebounds and six assists to re-tain her ranking of top scorer, while Kotsopoulos added five boards of her own.”We worked hard every possession, played tough de-fense, ran the floor and had a balanced attack,” Kotsopoulos said after the game.Sophomore Amy Rosen-krantz added nine points and five rebounds, while fel-low sophomore Kellie Poles chipped in eight off the bench for the Catamounts.Vermont was two seconds away from sweeping its pair of home games this week, but Stony Brook’s Mykeema Ford spoiled the party last Wednes-day night.Ford’s 21 point second half explosion, capped by a game winning three-pointer pro-pelled the Sea Wolves to a 72-71 win.Vermont lead 31-30 at the half, but Stony Brook used an 11-0 run early in the second half to jump out to a com-fortable 51-40 lead. Yet the Catamounts were not about to throw in the towel.A thrilling 22-4 run sparked by senior Alison Brown’s six points, brought the Cata-mounts roaring back into the game to take a 71-69 lead with 20 seconds left.”Its always one possession at a time, we just kept plug-ging away time after time,” Brown said.Ford’s dagger with two seconds left gave Stony Brook the lead, but it was almost trumped by senior captain Brittney Cross’ running layup attempt came up just short at the buzzer.Cross led the Catamounts with 14 points and seven as-sists on the night, while Court-nay Pilypaitis added 14 points and four assists of her own.”Chemistry will carry us through this rough spot, but there’s still a lot of basketball left,” Cross added after the game.Junior Sara Fenton added nine points and four rebounds against Stony Brook and soph-omore Kelli Poles scored 11 points and had eight boards, while dominating under the net.However, Vermont was not able to overcome Ford’s sec-ond half heroics when coupled with the Cats’ 22 costly turn-overs which were “very un-characteristic from our team, we need to take better care of the ball,” Coach Dawley com-mented.”It’s tough to lose with a shot that late in the game, but you have to give credit to Ford- she’s phenomenal. You saw the fight in our team, and the will to comeback, I loved the toughness and fight our team showed tonight,” Dawley said.