Evans leads Dukes to win over George Mason

FAIRFAX — Rashauna Hobbs saw the cross-over dribble and a stutter-step that followed. Everything after that was pretty much a blur.
One second, James Madison University point guard Dawn Evans was dancing with the basketball at the edge of the foul line. Then, in a flash, the 5-foot-7 lightning bolt was gone — splitting a seam in George Mason’s defense and scooting to the basket for another layup.
“Damn,” Hobbs mouthed silently to herself, a one word exclamation that pretty much sums up Evans’ gifts as a basketball player.
As a sophomore, she is already a candidate for the Naismith Trophy, which is presented each season to the best women’s basketball player in the country, and on Sunday she was mostly responsible for the Dukes’ 90-65 victory at Patriot Center.
“Dawn’s a leader and phenomenal point guard. Everyone looks up to her,” sophomore teammate Courtney Hamner said. “And she’s learning more and more so she’s getting even better.”
The Patriots might have a hard time believing that Evans can play any better than she did in the Colonial Athletic Association opener for both teams. She scored a game-high 29 points, hitting 11 of 17 field goal attempts, and also led the team with six assists as JMU extended its winning streak to five games and improved to 8-4 overall.
“Dawn is so good for so many different reasons but what impressed me is that in the first half, when I thought we did a fairly good job guarding her, she did a heck of a job finding the open man,” George Mason head coach Jeri Porter said. “She did a really nice job of creating for the people around her.”
The Patriots’ primary goal was to contest every shot that Evans attempted. But the nation’s second-leading scorer is unlike anything Mason has experienced this season. She was simply too elusive to defend.
“She’s obviously one of, if not the best, in the league,” Porter said. “It was an interesting introduction for me to Colonial play.”
Because Evans did such a tremendous job creating offense, the Dukes shot 60.7 percent from the field and Mason (2-9) wound up allowing its highest point total of the season. Hamner, an Osbourn Park graduate, finished with 15 points and senior Kisha Stokes, who once starred at Murry Bergtraum in New York, added 11 for JMU.
“I probably didn’t give them enough credit going in for being a good shooting team,” Porter said after the Patriots had their two-game winning streak snapped. “While we knew Dawn could score in several different ways, they have other kids who really do a nice job knocking down shots.”
The Patriots have made significant strides in that arena, too. Their 65 points equaled a season-high thanks in part to a career-high 18 points from guard sophomore Brittany Eley and a career-high 12 from freshman guard Becky Cox. Hobbs also scored 12 points, while sophomore Brittany Poindexter added 11 points and nine rebounds.
“Win or lose we’re trying to find progress,” Porter said. “The biggest concern for me as a defensive coach is that we gave up ninety points. We knew going into this game to get a win against JMU we were going to have to do a good job collectively. That formula that we had found that was really making a difference for us; I think we went away from that a little bit. I don’t know if that was the competition or not but I didn’t think we shared the ball quite as well and did the things we had to do defensively to be able to compete with them the way we wanted to.”
It didn’t help, either, that Evans plays in another dimension — a realm where only fledgling All-Americans tread.