STARKVILLE — Mississippi State women’s basketball began the 2025-26 season with a 66-57 win over Davidson on Monday at Humphrey Coliseum.
What started as a slow night offensively turned into a gritty win for the Bulldogs. Guard Destiney McPhaul stepped into the point-guard role with Saniyah King still recovering from a preseason injury and scored a career-high 20 points to lead the team to an opening-night win.
McPhaul’s evaluation of the performance? “Decent.”
“I feel like I played decent,” McPhaul said. “I could have done a lot of things better, but overall, I feel that I gave my team some energy. I love it.”
McPhaul is one of just a handful of key returning players from last year. She inherited the No. 2 jersey from JerKaila Jordan, and lived up to the legacy with her shooting on the night, but above all was focused on adjusting as a team moving forward.
“Early on, I was able to hit some shots, but I feel like after a while I was a little loose with the ball,” she said. “Could clean up some things, and definitely could do better than I did tonight.”
McPhaul did have two turnovers on the night, and as a team, the Bulldogs gave away possession 18 times. It was one mark of a disjointed performance that saw MSU fall behind early on before setting the pace in the second half.
Head coach Sam Purcell noted some of the early missteps, and for his group, the challenge down the stretch was turning those mistakes into opportunities.
The biggest adjustment came in defending the paint. Davidson netted 18 first-half points from down low, taking advantage of easy layups from turnovers and early miscommunications in defensive assignments for the Bulldogs. In the second half, MSU held its visitors to just eight points in the paint, slowing the game down and staying on top of the key players as they emerged for Davidson.
One such player was Ines Garcia Monje, a 6-2 freshman guard from Spain who presented a physical mismatch against the Bulldog backcourt, grabbing six rebounds and a steal. She finished the night as Davidson’s joint top scorer alongside Australian forward Charlise Dunn on 11 points.
The week before the game, Purcell highlighted the unknown talent from overseas and the threat the Wildcats posed in past matchups against Power 4 conference opponents. He began his postgame presser the same way.
“I told you, they’re good. That’s an NCAA Tournament team,” Purcell said of the visitors. “That’s a team that two years ago, you look at their record, went to Duke and won. Went to Wake and won. Last year, played NC State and almost had them on the ropes. There was no sleeping, there was no not preparing. I couldn’t be more excited about a great win, and most importantly, we’re going to get better.”
Purcell recognized the areas that need cleaning up, remarking that Tuesday would be a good day of practice for his team, but was much more excited than frustrated by the performance, pointing to easily correctable aspects of the game.
“My word is ‘opportunity,’ and they’re getting opportunity and they’re trying to seize it, they’re trying to please me,” he said of missed layups and turnovers early in the game. “Just slow down, gather the ball, and go up strong. There’s no doubt when we get those layups around the basket made, the 10 free throws, and then some of the mindless turnovers that we’ve worked hard on. This was going to be a game of not many possessions… so that’s what made this so close and so ugly, because Davidson is gonna play five out, they’re gonna cut you for a layup, and if they don’t have it they’ll wear you down for 20-24 seconds.”
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