25 things to know about the NCAA women’s tournament teams
Dawn Staley could lead her team to both another championship and an undefeated season.
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It’s Dawn Staley’s world, and the rest of college basketball is just trying to get a piece of it. Those shoes that she’s pitching on TV have gotten very comfortable the last 38 games. Six more wins, and the Philly legend will have guided South Carolina to consecutive championships.
Here are 25 things ahead of the women’s tournament, which begins Wednesday:
1. The star of women’s hoops this season is Iowa’s Caitlin Clark. She punctuated her regular season by hitting a buzzer-beating three-pointer to lift the Hawkeyes over Indiana. Then she followed it in the conference championship game with the first triple-double ever (30 points, 17 assists, 10 rebounds) in Big Ten tournament history.
2. Clark has 11 family members who played college sports, including her dad, who played baseball and basketball at Division III Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. Her brother, Blake, was a reserve quarterback and a holder on special teams last season for Iowa State.
3. Clark (27.0) entered the week tied for second in scoring nationally to Villanova’s Maddy Siegriest (28.9), who ESPN projected as the fourth overall pick in next month’s WNBA draft. Drexel’s Keishana Washington also averaged 27.0 coming into her conference tournament.
4. Indiana, which had been a program-best ranked No. 2 when it lost to Iowa, has never been to the Final Four. The Hoosiers are led by Mackenzie Holmes, who averages 22.3 points on a ridiculous 68.8% from the field during the regular season.
5. Holmes’ father, Lenny, was a basketball coach who once took his team to a clinic run by Indiana men’s coach Bobby Knight. Holmes grew up in Gorham, Maine, a tiny town in Maine more than a thousand miles away from Bloomington, Ind.
6. The tournament downsized from four regional sites to two. Greenville, S.C., and Seattle will host Sweet 16 and Elite Eight rounds. The Final Four is in Dallas. The championship is at 3 p.m. April 2 on ABC.
7. The sites for women’s Final Fours have been determined through 2031, and Philadelphia is not on the list.
8. Saint Louis, picked to finish 12th in the Atlantic 10, won the conference as the tournament’s No. 3-seed. Brooke Flowers leads the nation with 3.76 blocked shots per game.
9. LSU’s Angel Reese had 28 double-doubles in 30 games, including five games with at least 20 points and 20 rebounds. She led the SEC in scoring (23.4) and rebounding (15.5).
10. LSU backup point guard Last-Tear Poa, who is French Polynesian by way of Australia, explained to the New Orleans Times-Picayune the interesting story behind her name.
“My mom told me my great-grandmother had a dream [that] someone in my mom’s generation was pregnant. Before she passed away, a last tear came down her eye. She took her last breath [and died],” Poa said. “My mom decided the next child to come along was going to be named Last-Tear. She didn’t tell anyone. I’ve even got a birthmark [near the same left eye as the original tear]. I’ve cherished my great-grandmother even though I never met her.” Whew.
11. Maryland has five 1,000 point scorers — Diamond Miller, Abby Meyers, Lavender Briggs, Brinae Alexander, and Elisa Pinzan — and seven of the Terps’ 25 wins this season have come against opponents ranked in the AP Top 10. Freshman Ava Sciolla (Pennsbury) is a reserve who’s played in 12 games.
12. Dawn Staley’s defending champion South Carolina (32-0) is the nation’s only undefeated team — men or women. The Gamecocks have won 38 in a row and are trying to become the 10th women’s team to win the championship undefeated.
13. This will be the final run for “The Freshies,” Staley’s 2019 recruiting class. Seniors Zia Cooke (15.3) and Aliyah Boston (13.3) are South Carolina’s top two scorers. Boston was last year’s national player of the year, defensive player of the year, and Final Four MOP.
14. Recent odds on BetMGM had South Carolina at -145, Stanford and UConn 7-1, and everybody else 10-1 or higher.
15. The parents of Stanford star Cameron Brink played at Virginia Tech and were college roommates with Sonya and Dell Curry — Steph and Seth Curry’s parents. In fact, Sonya and Dell Curry are Cameron Brink’s godparents.
16. Virginia Tech’s best player also is its brightest. Elizabeth Kitley was named the ACC’s women’s basketball scholar-athlete of the year for the second consecutive time.
17. Tennessee’s Rickea Jackson and Jordan Horston will be high WNBA draft picks, according to mock drafts.
18. UNLV is making consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances for the first time in more than 30 years. The Rebels cracked the AP rankings this year for the first time since 1994. Desi-Rae Young, a 6-1 center, averages 18.2 points and 10.2 boards. She had two D-I scholarship offers coming out of high school: UNLV and Pepperdine.
19. Washington State won four games in five days to become the unlikely winner of the Pac-12 tournament championship. The Cougars were the seventh seed and beat three ranked opponents on the way (No. 8 Utah, No. 20 Colorado, and No. 17 UCLA).
20. Charlisse Leger-Walker, from Waikato, New Zealand, leads Washington State in scoring at 18.1 points per game. Her mother, Leanne, played for the Kiwis in the 2000 and 2004 Olympics.
21. Utah won a share of the Pac-12 regular-season crown for the first time in school history. Guard Gianna Kneepkens is a 42% three-point shooter who had 67 points in her final game in high school.
22. Pac-12 teams were 115-20 in nonconference games this season but just 6-9 against ranked opponents.
23. Notre Dame essentially played its last three games without star Olivia Miles. It rallied past Louisville in the season finale when Miles hurt her knee in the first quarter. The Fighting Irish slipped past N.C. State in their first ACC tournament game. But they were trashed by Louisville (64-38) in the semifinals. Her coach has characterized her as “day-to-day.”
24. UConn hasn’t won a championship since 2016, its longest drought since coach Geno Auriemma won his first title in 1995. The Huskies, however, have been to 14 consecutive Final Fours and been in the AP top-five most of this season despite some key injuries.
25. UConn star Aaliyah Edwards wears purple and yellow braids as a nod to Kobe Bryant. She watches highlights of Bryant before every game. “It’s my routine,” she told the Hartford Courant earlier this year.