At halftime on Tuesday, SLU’s women’s basketball team led Charlotte 34-33. From coach Shimmy Gray-Miller’s standpoint, that was a bad thing.

Gray-Miller hadn’t been too thrilled with her team’s intensity in the first half and with the team in the lead, she feared it would be tough to convince them they needed to be intense in the second half. The message didn’t get through, as Charlotte quickly retook the lead and expanded it over the rest of the half to win 70-58.

This was a big game for SLU, which had won four of its past five and was facing the second place team in the league. At 4-2, it was the best record ever for SLU after six conference games. SLU fell to 10-12, 4-3 and now has to go on the road to play another  of the Atlantic 10’s quality teams, Temple, on Sunday, in Philadelphia.

“They exploited our lack of athleticism,” Gray-Miller said. “I didn’t feel our intensity matched their intensity.” She wasn’t too surprised by it. She said the team had an uninspired practice on Monday. “You play how you practice,” she said.

“They turned up the intensity and we didn’t,” guard Theresa Lisch said. “We couldn’t get stops on defense and couldn’t get it going on offense.”

Lisch had 16 points at halftime and added four in the first two minutes of the second half, but then had just four the rest of the way. She didn’t get a shot off for the next 10 minutes. “They stepped it up and did a better job on defense,” said Gray-Miller, who felt the big problem was her team’s defense and inability to stop Charlotte from scoring.

SLU got beat on the boards 42-28 and Charlotte got 40 points in the paint. SLU couldn’t match Danielle Burgin, who had 14 points on 7 of 9 shooting and had 10 rebounds. With 3 minutes to go in the game, Charlotte was shooting 68.4 percent from the field in the second half. SLU was shooting 32 percent.

Amanda Kemezys had 10 points and 10 rebounds for SLU. Alisha Goodwin was 1 for 7 from the field.

SLU is getting more playing time from Katie Paganelli, who is returning from an injury. After playing 10 minutes against UMass, she played 18 mintues against Charlotte. Gray-Miller gave Paganelli instructions to try to crank up the intensity when she came into the game. That’s something SLU will need the rest of the season.