Cold 2nd half ends Cardinal’s season
DALLAS — With an ice pack on her right ankle, Karlie Samuelson hobbled around the quiet Stanford locker room, bending down to hug her teammates as they sat on folding chairs with their heads down in tears.
Samuelson’s ankle sprain in the second quarter wasn’t the reason the Cardinal lost to South Carolina 62-53 in the NCAA Tournament semifinals Friday night. But it didn’t help.
Samuelson, the team’s top perimeter shooter, tried to play in the second half, but she was clearly hampered. “We really struggled without our glue out there,” head coach Tara VanDerveer said.
The Gamecocks will play in Sunday’s final against Mississippi State, which beat UConn 66-64 in overtime in the second semifinal.
Stanford (32-6) led at the half 29-20 after holding South Carolina to six points in the second quarter. The Cardinal appeared headed toward
the program’s fifth appearance in the final.
Then they went cold in the third quarter (19 percent shooting), and the Gamecocks (32-4) took off.
Guard Allisha Gray scored 18 points, and All-American center A’ja Wilson had 13 points and 19 rebounds, eight of them on the offensive glass, for South Carolina.
The SEC champs scored 13 straight points to take a 39-33 lead in the third quarter. Stanford would close to 53-50 with a little over two minutes left, but a three-pointer by Alanna Smith was all the Cardinal could muster the rest of the way.
“We got out of sync and never got it going in the third quarter,” VanDerveer said. “That was disappointing for us.”
Pointing in particular to the efforts of Erica McCall (14 points, 14 rebounds) and Smith (14 points, 12 rebounds), she said, “So proud of how hard we fought . ... We will hold our heads up high leaving Dallas.”
Samuelson, trying hard to compose herself, tried to play down her injury, which appeared to come when she stepped on another player’s foot. For the first time this season she went scoreless, taking just two shots, both from three-point range.
“It was just a sprain, something I could play on,’’ she said. “I was less mobile for sure. My team did well when I came out, anyway. We were up nine.”
With a heavily taped ankle, she was vulnerable in the second half. Gray immediately went right at her and banked in a shot. Pretty soon, Samuelson was lifted in favor of Briana Roberson. Samuelson returned in the final minutes when Stanford badly needed a threepointer, but she didn’t get another shot.
“I was going to play,” Samuelson said. “It’s my last game, and it’s the Final Four.”
Wilson, a 6-foot-5 junior, had just four points in the first half as the Cardinal double-teamed her and tried to take away her drives to the left. She switched and went right, to good effect, in the second half.
“She’s an outstanding player, one of the best post players in the nation, for sure,” Smith said. “It was really difficult guarding her.”
South Carolina’s Kaela Davis, who had been on a tear in the postseason, had just six points on 2-for-15 shooting. But Gray and freshman guard Tyasha Harris (10 points) picked up the scoring slack.
Head coach Dawn Staley, who played for VanDerveer on the gold-medal winning U.S. Olympic team in 1996, said her team was “fortunate” to trail by only nine at the intermission.
“In the second half, I thought we just imposed our will from a defensive standpoint, sped the game up and got playing at a pace which benefited our style of play,” Staley said.
In the Stanford locker room, McCall said, “I don’t think it’s hit me yet” that the season is over. “I still feel like we’ve got a game in the upcoming days. Right now, I’m smiling. I’m proud of how this team performed. I’m proud of the career I’ve had at Stanford, the love I have here. I can only keep smiling.”