INDIANAPOLIS: As the eagerly anticipated LSU-Iowa girls’s rematch was about to tip off, Washington State coach Kamie Ethridge took a seat in Indianapolis, lamented her staff’s season-ending loss and celebrated one other milestone second for the game.
Four extra girls’s groups have been taking part in right here, in April, due to the NCAA’s new Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament.
Inside one of many sport’s venerable venues, Butler’s Hinkle Fieldhouse, Ethridge was certainly one of many gamers and coaches gushing in regards to the alternatives this new occasion offered for the sport — even after an 81-58 semifinal loss to Illinois in entrance of a principally orange-clad crowd on Monday evening.
“Unfortunately, I don’t know if that was neutral,” Ethridge joked. “I thought Illinois showed up really well. Great environment, great environment and better to have that than an empty arena.”
Sure, getting followers to Monday afternoon video games with the second recreation bleeding into the beginning of the a lot ballyhooed Caitlin Clark-Angel Reese rivalry by no means was going to be simple. But the beginning occasions created a seemingly made-for-television quadruple-header on one of many largest days within the sport’s historical past.
For those that made the two-hour drive from Champaign to Indy, it was effectively well worth the journey.
Fourth-seeded Illinois (18-15) has now gained a college report 4 consecutive postseason video games in a single tourney. One extra — Wednesday evening towards top-seeded Villanova (22-12) — would give the Fighting Illini their first postseason event title in program historical past.
So in a season full of a rising quantity of sellouts, main headlines and extra prime-time televised video games and growing scores, the scene taking part in out at Hinkle appeared a pure reflection of the altering dynamics of girls’s basketball throughout the nation.
“It was definitely a sea of orange out there,” Illinois heart Camille Hobby stated. “So many of our fans drove over from the university area and other parts of Illinois, it was really exciting to see everyone. They were loud. It was exciting. It definitely was a boost to us.”
A bigger crowd could present up for Wednesday’s 7 p.m. tip.
This is exactly what NCAA organizers envisioned by saying final summer season they’d financially again and run a secondary girls’s nationwide postseason tourney — almost twenty years after taking up the NIT.
The funding got here at a time curiosity in girls’s basketball was surging and fewer than 4 years after gamers and coaches complained in regards to the clear disparities between the 2021 males’s and ladies’s NCAA tournaments performed in bubbles throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
They didn’t finish there. At this 12 months’s girls’s tourney, a battle of curiosity involving one ref prompted NCAA officers to make a mid-game change, and final weekend on the Portland Regional got here the revelation that the 3-point strains weren’t an identical.
Here, although, there was just about unanimous help and these groups, in contrast to a few of the males’s Power Five groups, resisted opting out.
“To be the first champions would be really cool,” Villanova star Lucy Olsen. “We wish we were in March Madness again. The past two years have been awesome experiences. But we didn’t make it. So we’re not just going to quit. We’re a team of winners. We don’t want to lose, so any game you put in front of us, we’re going to try to win.”
Another indication of the rising recognition of girls’s basketball is that the WNIT nonetheless exists because it at all times has, beneath a separate possession group from each the NCAA and the earlier NIT organizers.
That means much more girls’s groups can maintain taking part in and Penn State coach Carolyn Kieger believes it gives a useful foundational profit.
“I’ve been a part of a lot of WNIT Championship games or Final Four games, and now with the WBIT, I did it,” she stated after the Nittany Lions’ 58-53 loss to Villanova. “Every single time, it propelled us into the future. It taught us how to win in March. It taught us how to lose. It taught us how to be tough.”
And it’s not about solely Clark or Reese, LSU or Iowa, UConn or South Carolina.
It’s tournaments like this the place the subsequent era of stars and up-and-coming groups can flourish, develop and study what it takes to go from challenger to champion.
“You have to be built the right way to advance, and we are just not quite built the right way to beat a team like Illinois right now,” Ethridge stated. “That’s why you can turn on the TV right now — I’m sure there’s a game going on where you see unique skillsets and athletes and sizes and bodies, and just the talent level. That’s why they are still playing right now.”
___
AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-womens-bracket/ and protection: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness
(This story has not been edited by News18 workers and is revealed from a syndicated information company feed – Associated Press)
