Previewing Princeton, FDU women in NCAA Tournament and ‘the challenge ahead’
Princeton-Iowa State is the opening game of the women’s tournament on Wednesday, while FDU puts its 22-game win streak on the line Friday at TCU.
At 8:30 Sunday night, the Princeton women’s basketball team learned its NCAA Tournament fate: They had made the field, their sixth consecutive season doing so, and they had a game Wednesday evening against Iowa State.
Before noon on Monday, the team was wheels up en route to their destination of South Bend, Ind.
Talk about a quick turnaround. Such are the challenges of playing in the First Four – Princeton’s first time faced with that task.
The Tigers will battle Iowa State for the No. 11 seed in the Birmingham 3 region tonight. The winner takes on No. 6 Michigan Friday, and then potentially No. 3 Notre Dame Sunday. The prospect of playing three games in five days is another wrinkle a team must manage when it’s part of the “Last Four In” – in Princeton’s case, the last team in the field – and playing in the First Four, which was only introduced to the women’s bracket in 2022.
Princeton has a nice tournament streak going, but this is terra nova for the Tigers.
“When our name was called, if you saw the pictures and the video, just a lot of joy, excitement,” coach Carla Berube said Monday via Zoom. “They know what it’s like to play in the NCAA Tournament and how grateful we are. … I can say I hadn’t been in that position before, so it was new but it was just really exciting and just thrilled for the challenge ahead.”
Princeton’s shot at a sixth straight Ivy League postseason title was dashed by Harmoni Turner and Harvard in a 70-67 semifinal decision Friday at Brown. Harvard went on to topple Columbia in the championship game, and the Lions joined the Tigers in the First Four. They’ll play Washington Thursday.
Berube said she took Saturday off while Princeton’s tournament fate was in limbo, though she kept her faith in ESPN’s bracketology projection that the Tigers would make it as an at-large.
“I just believe in Charlie Crème,” she quipped, “and I started watching some Iowa State and some … Washington, because those were some possibilities (for opponents).”
That bit of advance scouting may be a slight leg up for Princeton, but the program truly didn’t know who it would face – or where – until half past eight on Selection Sunday.
Berube praised her director of basketball operations, Lilly Paro, who “was up the entire night just getting us ready to go,” managing the logistics of not only planning the team’s travel but also the band and cheerleaders making the trip.
Princeton landed at 1:30, the coach had her Zoom call with reporters at 4:00 and the team got its first practice in before the end of the day.
“It’s such a quick turnaround. We were just playing on Friday, and now our first NCAA Tournament game is on Wednesday,” Berube said. “But we’ll pick it any time. We’re in the NCAA Tournament, so we’re just excited to be here and to be playing.”
The Tigers have a tall task against Iowa State, literally. Top scorer Audi Crooks (23.2 ppg) is a bruising 6-foot-3 center who just this month went for 36 points and 10 rebounds against a strong Kansas State team. 6-foot-2 forward Addy Brown scores 15.2 per game, and they each average 7.6 rebounds, part of the third-best defensive rebounding team in the sport, per BartTorvik.com.
“We were different than we were, you know, a couple years ago. There’s no Ellie Mitchell inside,” Berube said. “We actually have some length in the middle with our fives. But it’s certainly not just our fives’ responsibility with her (Crooks), so it’s a full team effort.”
While it’s fair to say that Princeton would be an even better team with a healthy Madison St. Rose, the Tigers found their best available rotation in the weeks and months after St. Rose tore her ACL against Quinnipiac in November.
Skye Belker (13.1 ppg, 38.2% from three), Ashley Chea (12.5 ppg, 36.1%) and Fadima Tall (10.3 ppg, 6.3 rpg) are all sophomores who had a taste of the tournament in last year’s first-round loss to West Virginia.
“I think some of our best basketball has been in the last few weeks, you know, the way we played at Harvard,” Berube said. “… I think we’ve got a good rotation and, you know, players are stepping up still and our sophomores are becoming great leaders. I think we like where we’re at right now.”
Belker in particular is someone to watch against the Cyclones. She’s averaged 14.9 points per game on 52.4% shooting, and 41.4% from three, in the past eight games. And one of Iowa State’s weaknesses is the 34.9% it gives up from the arc, one of the weakest perimeter defenses in D1.
Princeton-Iowa State is the opening game of the women’s tournament, tonight at 7 p.m. on ESPNU. FDU, meanwhile, puts its 22-game win streak on the line Friday as a No. 15 seed at No. 2 TCU, 3:30 p.m. on ESPN2.
For those who may not know, women’s basketball does not see nearly as many upsets as the men’s tournament does, and the greater the seeding divide, the unlikelier it will be. Just one seed worse than a 13 has ever won a game in the women’s tournament. The talent gap between the high-majors and low-majors is just too wide.
But if there’s one school that has proven before that the improbable is possible, and would want to do so again, it’s obviously FDU.
“Yeah, we kind of learned from the men a couple years ago when they had their upset from Purdue,” coach Stephanie Gaitley told the New York Post. “The women’s game’s a little bit more difficult just because TCU’s on their home court. So obviously not having that neutral court I think does make a difference. It makes the upset more difficult.
“My biggest thing – and we played at UConn this year, we played at Rutgers, we played at Syracuse, and some of the reason behind playing them was just to get us ready for moments like this. For us, I think the biggest thing for us is fear no one, respect all, and go out and just play hard.”
One thing TCU has in spades is experience in March. Their big three of Hailey Van Lith, Sedona Prince and Madison Conner have gone on tournament runs with their former teams – LSU, Oregon and Arizona, respectively. Torvik’s T-Rank pegs TCU as the No. 8 overall team in the country.
There are two area FDU excels in that could pose problems for TCU: smart basketball and 3-point shooting. When I say smart basketball, that’s both a low turnover rate and not sending opponents to the line. FDU ranks eighth nationally in fewest fouls per game.
Those happen to align with two weaknesses in the Horned Frogs’ game – they don’t force a high percentage of turnovers, and they’re barely top 300 in free throw rate, attempting just 14.5 per game. That translates to points left on the table when you’re a bigger, stronger team like TCU trying to pull away from a supposedly outmatched opponent.
The shooting piece is straightforward: TCU allows 33% from the arc, a pretty pedestrian defense, and FDU makes 34.6%. If the Horned Frogs choose to double-team Teneisia Brown inside, watch for Ava Renninger, Abaigeal Babore or Lilly Parke to knock down some open threes.
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A quick Cleaning the Glass with a few postseason topics I haven’t touched on yet:
Both Seton Hall and Rutgers women’s basketball are still in action in the postseason. Seton Hall opens as a No. 3 seed in the WBIT against a Quinnipiac team that was frankly good enough to play in the NCAA Tournament. That’s a team that not only beat Princeton (the day St. Rose got hurt), but also demolished Harvard by 23. More surprisingly, Rutgers got an invite to the WNIT, which has taken a back seat to the WBIT as the third-best women’s postseason event. Rutgers received a first-round bye and will face either Army or Bryant in Round 2.
The transfer portal is up and running. Well, it’s technically not open till March 24 but teams whose seasons are over are being affected. The biggest exodus in New Jersey is at FDU. Not only did I miss Terrence Brown declaring his intentions to enter the portal before I mentioned him in Monday’s column, but Brayden Reynolds, Jameel Morris, Cam Tweedy and Dylan Jones joined him this week. If none of them pull out and return to Hackensack, that leaves very little in the cupboard for Jack Castleberry’s third season.
Other notables who’ve entered the portal: Darius Gakwasi (Princeton), Jaret Valencia (Monmouth), Tariq Ingraham (Rider). Gakwasi is out of Ivy League eligibility and heading out as a grad transfer. Valencia was a preseason all-CAA second-team selection but lost his starting job halfway through the year, and his production ticked down overall. Ingraham has a seventh year of college eligibility and will test the waters, though the word was he enjoyed being at Rider, so that may not be a definite departure yet.