Not even a bloody nose was enough to stop Chelsea Poppens from leading her team to a season-opening win, becoming the 23rd player in ISU women’s basketball history to amass 1,000 career points in the process.

The Cyclones (1-0) defeated Western Illinois (0-1) 84-65 on Sunday afternoon at Hilton Coliseum for their first official win of the season.

Poppens got the bloody nose at the midpoint of the second half, but it was nothing that forced her to leave the game.

“She never wants to come out of the game,” said ISU coach Bill Fennelly, who is now 18-0 in season openers at Iowa State. “When she got the blood, the official said to me, ‘Coach, are you taking her out?’ and I said, ‘Are you crazy?’”

Poppens, who hadn’t even realized she was bleeding right away, did not let that get in the way of her picking up her first double-double of the season with 23 points and 15 rebounds. She also played for 36 minutes Sunday and recorded three fouls with none coming in the first half.

Poppens said she is attempting to play smart but still aggressive in her final season.

“I’m just trying not to make silly fouls,” Poppens said. “In the first half, I tried not to take any charges but in the second half, obviously, I didn’t do so well at that.”

In the first half, Iowa State allowed Western Illinois to shoot 53.6 percent in field goals and 46.2 percent from 3-point range to take a halftime lead of 40-38. In the second half, the ISU defense was able to keep the Leathernecks to 40 percent on field goals and 30 percent from 3.

“That’s kind of what we talked about at halftime: just coming out with more energy [and] not throwing the ball away as much because we weren’t playing good defense,” Poppens said. “They were getting good shots on offense and we were just giving it to them. Offensively, we just kept turning the ball over. We just worked on being more patient.”

The turning point for Iowa State came with 7:48 left in the second half when guard Nicole Blaskowsky made a 3-pointer from the right corner in transition to put the Cyclones up 66-58.

While the ISU offense started 0-for-10 from 3-point range, Christofferson said it went 11-for-19 after that and shooting the ball well just seemed contagious.

“We kind of had a stop on defense and once one person hits, everybody kind of gets that energy and passes it around and everybody keeps hitting,” Christofferson said.