Rice win women’s WBI title
Title in national postseason event a first for program
Owls hope to use first national postseason tournament championship to lift program to “higher heights.”
Maya Hawkins couldn’t think of many better ways to end her college career.
The senior from Mansfield scored a team-high 17 points to help lead Rice to a 74-62 victory over North Carolina-Greensboro in the Women’s Basketball Invitational championship game Sunday.
In helping the Owls win their first national postseason tournament title, she also became the 17th player in Rice program history to surpass 1,000 career points.
But leaving the Owls with something on which they can build for years to come is what matters most.
“This is the foundation,” Hawkins said. “This is the beginning, and I think that we’re headed in the right direction. We’re leaving behind a program that’s headed toward excellence.
“So to be able to come back and see our legacy started here by winning the WBI championship is going to be something me and (Jasmine Goodwine) can be really proud of.”
Get the scissors
On Sunday at Tudor Fieldhouse, Rice cut down the nets for the first time since winning the Western Athletic Conference tournament in 2005.
Hawkins, the tournament MVP, got plenty of help from her teammates, including Goodwine and Shani Rainey with 13 points each, , Lexie Ducat with 12 and Wendy Knight with 10.
Owls second-year coach Tina Langley joked that one of her few coaching shortcomings during her team’s WBI run was in not being able to teach her players how to cut down the nets for the first time.
“It was different, right?” Langley said as she looked at Goodwine and Hawkins, two of her three seniors, in the postgame news conference. “Spring break came, and we didn’t get one. And we ended up understanding how exciting that is and how fortunate we are to be one of those teams that gets to keep playing.”
Rice started well, getting out to a 15-8 lead thanks to Hawkins’ hot streak. She scored 12 of her points on 5-of-6 shooting with two 3-pointers by the sevenminute mark of the second quarter.
But the Spartans answered with a 30-15 run to take a 38-30 halftime lead.
The Owls regained the momentum with a 7-0 run to start the second half but did not regain the lead until Shani Rainey’s free throw after she was fouled on a fast break.
Rice increased that 49-48 lead with 1:44 remaining in the third quarter to a 62-52 margin with 4:32 left in the game.
With six minutes remaining, Rainey suffered a knee injury and had to be carried off the court, but her 13 points and key free throws proved to be crucial.
Building winning culture
After watching the rest of the game in the locker room, an emotional Rainey made her way back to the court on crutches and received perhaps the biggest ovation of the night as she gingerly climbed a ladder and cut a piece of the net.
The Rice men’s team (2312) and the women’s team (22-13) combined for 45 wins this year — the most between the programs in school history. And the women have a trophy to boot.
“Starting in 2014 when we changed the men’s program around and changed the culture there and then the next year changing out the women’s program, we felt like this was a moment that we’d get to,” Rice athletics director Joe Karlgaard said. “We just didn’t know how fast it’d happen. We have even higher heights to reach from here.”