ST. PAUL, Minn. — The Saint Mary's University women's basketball team has prided itself on its defense this season.

The offense has struggled a bit during the Cardinals' season-opening 2-1 run through their nonconference schedule, but one thing has been constant — SMU's defense has been air-tight.

Wednesday evening, however, St. Thomas poked few holes in that stingy Cardinal defense, as the Tommies scored more points in the first half (38) than SMU managed the entire game (35), as UST rolled to an 86-35 victory in the teams' Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference opener.

"This certainly wasn't one of our better performances on either end of the court," said SMU coach Shawn Stimmel, whose team had not given up more than 52 points in any of its first three games. "We played hard and stayed with them for a stretch, but once (St. Thomas) got on a roll, it just seemed to snowball."

That snowball began taking shape late in the first half, as UST used a 17-7 run to end the game's first 20 minutes, then used a 28-8 run to open the second half to dispose of SMU, which netted just four second-half field goals and turned the ball over 35 times.

"The first three games we played, we were pretty solid on the defensive end, but struggled a bit offensively," said Stimmel, whose team went 4-for-32 (12 percent) from the field in the second half and had just one player — Kelly Tanke (La Crosse, Wis.) score more than nine points. "But tonight, we struggled in all facets of the game — we couldn't keep (St. Thomas) from scoring, and we couldn't find our shooting touch at all.

"It was just one of those games."