It took the length of the regular season, but after amassing a 22-8 record including 10 wins in conference play, the Virginia women's basketball team cracked the AP Top 25 as it headed to the ACC Tournament in early March as the No. 4 seed. The Cavaliers fell to eventual conference champion North Carolina in the semifinals but were put officially "on the radar" of college basketball fans and coaches nationwide. Coach Debbie Ryan's squad earned a No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament in the Greensboro Region and last weekend carried the momentum of their season to Norfolk, Va. to face the University of California-Santa Barbara.
Virginia handled the Gauchos with ease in the first round, winning 86-52 and advancing to play Old Dominion in the Round of 32. The Cavaliers lost a thriller in overtime, falling 88-85 in what was the most exciting basketball game I've seen this season, men's or women's. And yes, I watch a lot of college basketball. This game was full of scoring runs and comebacks, such as in the first half, when the Cavaliers were down as many as 12 points on a few separate occasions but fought back to cut the deficit to 3 at halftime. Virginia trailed the majority of the game but forced overtime after junior center Aisha Mohammed converted the foul shot on a 3-point play with less than two seconds left on the clock after a heart-stopping series of shot attempts and rebounds in the last 13 seconds. Overtime didn't go the way the Cavaliers wanted, but they still played a great game and fought hard till the end, battling against a solid basketball team as well as an unusual tournament advantage.
You might recall in my last column I wrote about how North Carolina's men's team was able to play its way to the Final Four without leaving the state of North Carolina. If you thought this was ridiculous too, you might find what happened in the women's tournament to be questionable as well. Old Dominion, the No. 5 seed in the Greensboro Region, played the first two rounds of the tournament on its home court, like many other teams in the women's tournament. To draw interest and fill the seats of early round games in the women's tournament, the NCAA selection committee places teams that qualify for the tournament (and whose arenas were pre-selected to host games) to play on their home court.
So, when the Cavaliers played the Lady Monarchs in the second round, they were playing in front of a raucous ODU home crowd that filled most of the Ted Constant Convocation Center in Norfolk. I don't want to take anything away from the ODU players
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