It was a very bad Wednesday night for Centenary. And it could have been even worse.

McNeese State dominated the hopelessly overmatched Ladies for an 86-35 win at Burton Coliseum despite not being at its absolute sharpest.

The Cowgirls (5-2) never had to break much of a sweat, but left the 51-point win knowing they have some things to work on after shooting 16.7 percent (4 of 24) from 3-point range and 50 percent (8 of 16) at the free-throw line.

“What’s good is we won big, but we’ve got a lot of teaching points,” said Cowgirls head coach Brooks Donald Williams. “We’ve got a lot of things we know we have to get better at. Time is getting shorter as we approach conference play and there’s a lot of things that we have to polish up.”

One area the Cowgirls wanted to polish against Centenary was their full-court press, and they did so thoroughly enough to be able to see their own reflection.

The Ladies (0-9), who were playing their lone Division I opponent of the season, nearly had as many turnovers (31) as points (35).

Donald Williams said she pressed more than she would have liked against an overmatched opponent, but stuck with it for longer than the scoreboard dictated because so many young players needed the practice.

“We wanted to use the press to take a little pressure off our offense,” Donald Williams said. “We probably should have gotten out of it a lot earlier, but we had some rotations with other kids that we wanted to work on it too. We really needed to practice with playing time with our younger kids and some of our older kids with chemistry. Moving forward, we’re not going to be able to do that.”

Forward Talisa Boyd was the key cog of the full-court defense.

“We really haven’t had anybody that good on-ball in the press since Kiara Johnson, which is why we haven’t been effective in our press,” Donald Williams said.

Boyd had five steals along with nine points and seven rebounds, six of which were offensive.

“If you don’t play hard, you won’t get the steal or force them into the trap,” Boyd said.

Allison Baggett was the only player for either team to score in double figures. Baggett had a season-high 26 points in 19 minutes.

All 15 Cowgirls saw the floor, with 14 of them scoring a bucket.(Rick Hickman/American Press)

Kirk Meche