Mar 21, 2026, 07:04 PM ET<\/p>\n
SALEM, Va. — Abby Cooch scored 18 points, Ada Taute added 15 points and 10 rebounds, and Denison beat Scranton 55-41 on Saturday to win the program’s first Division III national championship.<\/p>\n
Denison (30-2), which has won six games in a row, extended the program’s single-season wins record.<\/p>\n
Anelly Mad-toingu\u00e9 grabbed 16 rebounds to go with eight points and three blocks for the Big Red.<\/p>\n
Scranton (32-1) beat NYU, which had won back-to-back national titles, 60-52 in the semifinals to snap the Violets’ 91-game win streak — the second-longest streak of its kind in NCAA history — and advance to the championship game for the first time since 1985. UConn women’s basketball won a record 111 straight at the Division I level.<\/p>\n
Elizabeth Bennett made a tiebreaking 3-pointer with 9:03 left in the game but Cooch and Taute answered with back-to-back 3s to spark a 14-0 run to take a 50-39 lead with 3:20 remaining. Kaeli Romanowski made a layup 12 seconds later, but the Lady Royals didn’t score again.<\/p>\n
Kaci Kranson had 10 points — all in the third quarter — and nine rebounds for Scranton. Meghan Lamanna also scored 10 points and Romanowski had a career-high 17 rebounds to go with nine points. Kranson has Landmark Conference-record 2,002 career points, which ranks second in program history behind Jennifer Nish (2,178 points from 1993-97).<\/p>\n
Denison made just 8 of 38 (21%) from the field, 2 of 17 from behind the arc, in the first half but limited the Lady Royals to 11% (4 of 37) shooting, 2 of 19 from 3-point range. Scranton went 0 for 17 from the field and was outscored 8-1 in the second quarter.<\/p>\n
The Lady Royals outscored Denison 23-14 in the third quarter to take a 34-33 lead into the fourth.<\/p>\n
Scranton, which went into the game No. 2 nationally in scoring offense (80.4 per game), had its lowest-scoring game this season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mar 21, 2026, 07:04 PM ET SALEM, Va. — Abby Cooch scored 18 points, Ada Taute added 15…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[178,180,179],"class_list":["post-144969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}