CARBONDALE, Ill. – It looked like Western Kentucky hadn’t played a basketball game in 10 days.

Plays weren’t crisp, and it took until the second half for the Lady Toppers to find any sort of rhythm.

Tashia Brown carried WKU in the first half and had some help with a 3-point barrage from Ivy Brown in the second in a 75-49 win at Southern Illinois on Sunday at SIU Arena.

Ivy Brown had 16 points in the third quarter thanks to four straight 3-pointers to help WKU (5-3) pull away for its fourth straight win. The Brown duo each finished with 20 points.

“When you go 10 days without playing, you can practice all week and go hard all week, but it’s different when you’re not playing,” Ivy Brown said. “It was good to get out here and see what we’ve been working on.”

Thankfully for WKU, it’ll have a quick turnaround with Mississippi Valley State coming to Diddle Arena at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday. WKU’s last game before Sunday was a 92-54 rout Nov. 30 against Evansville.

Although SIU’s only lead was a short-lived four-point edge in the first quarter, WKU was outworked in a few areas of the game despite the 26-point victory.

The Salukis held a 24-16 scoring advantage in the paint and their bench outscored WKU’s 27-13. The Lady Toppers committed 16 turnovers and had just nine assists.

“Sloppiness,” WKU coach Michelle Clark-Heard said. “We weren’t reading the defense in a lot of situations and trying to make really soft passes, not making the extra pass to the right person and trying to force the ball on the inside at times. We’ve got to learn from that.”

But they made up for it everywhere else.

Brown’s hot shooting was part of WKU’s 8 of 13 (.615) clip from behind the arc and 15 of 19 (.789) shooting from the free-throw line.

Whitney Creech, Raneem Elgedawy and Sidnee Bopp each had eight points and Sherry Porter had six points for WKU.

Dee Givens didn’t score but was effective for the Lady Tops with seven offensive rebounds, nine total.

WKU broke loose from a 38-30 halftime lead with Ivy Brown draining four 3s. WKU scored on its first nine possessions of the third quarter to quickly build a 20-point cushion.

“We just wanted to keep being aggressive on defense,” Ivy Brown said. “We struggled a little bit the first few games on defense and we really focused on that this past week and our aggressiveness on defense led to offense.”

Tashia Brown carried WKU through the first quarter with 10 points while the rest of the team searched for any rhythm they could.

Kylie Giebelhausen’s 3-pointer put SIU ahead 14-10 before WKU stormed back on an 11-4 run to end the first quarter.

Ivy Brown started the second with a triple from the right wing as part of a 9-1 run to build a double-digit lead at 30-19 at the 8:08 mark.

WKU’s offense cooled off while SIU cut the deficit in half with Makenzie Silvey’s layup to make it 35-30 with 1:52 left in the half.

Bopp’s 3-pointer broke a two-minute scoreless drought and WKU took a 38-30 lead into halftime. Tashia Brown had 14 points in the first half.

Ivy Brown got the Lady Toppers rolling to open the second half with three straight 3-pointers – two from the same spot by the WKU bench and a buzzer beater on the other side. Tashia Brown’s jumper made it an 11-1 run in the first two and a half minutes of the third quarter and a 49-31 WKU lead.

WKU scored on nine straight possessions to open the third quarter before Bopp’s turnover with WKU leading 60-35 halfway through the quarter.

Ivy Brown’s wide-open layup gave her 16 points for the quarter and a 62-38 lead.

She finished the game shooting 7 of 10 from the floor and made 5 of 7 3-point attempts.

WKU shot 26 of 58 (.448) from the floor and held SIU to 18 of 51 (.353) shooting.

“I talked to them about their intensity in the locker room and making sure on the road that to be successful, you’ve got to give everything you can,” Heard said. “We picked up our intensity and it’s great to have two seniors like Tashia and Ivy. Tashia played really good in the first half and Ivy stepped up in the second half. We’re very fortunate and blessed to have two players like them who play two different styles of game.”{&end}