RALEIGH -- Joli Robinson said that she got the kind of effort she wanted from her N.C. Central team on Monday.

But what the Eagles didn’t get was a win.

Quisannah Noel scored 19 points, including three 3-pointers, while Quinn Lewis added 14 points with 11 rebounds as St. Paul’s ousted the Eagles 58-53 in the opening round of the CIAA women’s basketball tournament at the RBC Center.

"We wanted to come out and play hard today, and that’s what we did," said Robinson, whose team got only 10 scoreless minutes out of second-leading scorer Nichole Davis, who went down with a sprained left ankle on a collision just 3:23 into the game. "We came out and played today. There’s no reason [for NCCU players] to have their heads down.

"Any time you lose an athlete like [Davis] it certainly affects you. We tried to put her back into the game in the second half, but she just couldn’t go."

It was St. Paul’s first win in the tournament in 15 years, and first opening-round loss for the Eagles (8-19) in the tournament since 1998. St. Paul’s (12-11) advanced to today’s 3 p.m. quarterfinal against Fayetteville State (20-6), the top seed from the East Division.

"I thought we came out a little lethargic," said first-season Tigers coach Anthony Portley, whose team beat the Eagles three times this season. "But Central did a good job preparing for us. We beat them by 25 points [four days earlier at the Tigers’ Taylor-Whitehead Gym], but they kind of figured out what we were doing later in that game and were really ready for us today."

Tiona Beatty led NCCU with 25 points including 10-for-11 from the free-throw line. And senior guard Tiffany Foster had 11 points and 12 rebounds, the first double-double of her career. Freshman Natasha Bailey came off the bench to get 13 rebounds.

"Everybody played hard today," said Beatty, a junior guard who was the only Eagle this season who had gotten significant playing time on the back-to-back NCAA Tournament teams in 2001 and 2002. "We caused some trouble for them in our press, but we can’t do that for 40 minutes when we only have nine players."

Foster, who had much more playing time in her freshman and senior seasons than the two in between, was happy to end her personal career on a good note.

"We definitely wanted to win," said Foster, who Robinson said had been so tense about the game she had trouble sleeping Sunday night. "But it’s good I got a double-double. We played hard.

"It was great playing here for four years. We made school history, going to the NCAA Tournament in back-to-back years."

The Tigers, who outshot the Eagles 32.8 to 27.9 percent and outrebounded them 50-43, looked ready to run NCCU out of the arena in the early going when they came out with an 11-2 lead.

But the Eagles slowly reeled them back in, trailing 22-18 at halftime and taking their first lead at 25-24 on a Beatty 3-pointer with 17:01 to go. NCCU’s biggest lead was right after that, as Leighla Holder added a three-point play with 16:25 left.

St. Paul’s took the lead for good at 29-28 on Noel’s long 3-pointer at 14:25. The Tigers led by as much as 43-33 on another Noel 3-pointer at the 8:14 mark.

NCCU rallied again and kept things close until the final seconds, cutting the edge back to 55-53 with 23.9 seconds left. But Lewis hit the back end of a two-shot opportunity before any more time expired, and Jhimere Putman copied it with 11.0 remaining to seal the outcome.

"It feels very good –– we’re not going home," Noel said. "We’ve got a lot of confidence now."

Added Lewis, "The jitters are gone now. We can beat anybody in the tournament."

NOTES -- Foster ended her NCCU career with 339 points. ... Beatty, who did not make the All-CIAA team, finished the season with 469 points, the fourth highest season total at NCCU since the 1986-87 season (previous records are missing).