SHU wins first NCAA tourney game
March may be the month of Madness, but there are a lot of happy people on the campus of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield. The women’s basketball team registered the first NCAA team tournament win for any sport in school history while grabbing the first March Madness win for a Northeast Conference women’s team.
The Pioneers team erased an early, 10-point deficit on the way to a 5747 victory over Southern University Wednesday in the NCAA First Four at Stanford University.
SHU, now the underdog of the West Regional as the No. 16 seed, gets No. 1 Stanford at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Maples Pavilion in a first-round game on ESPN2.
Senior guard Olivia Tucker led the Pioneers with 13 points, while firstyear guard Ny’Ceara Pryor (10 assists, eight rebounds), chipped in 11 points and junior forward Kelsey Wood added 10.
The Jags came out running and built a 14-4 lead before the Pioneers finally found their offensive touch more than 3 minutes in. A pair of 3s from first-year guard Amelia Wood got them going, and SHU made it a 16-12 game at the end of the first quarter.
“We were 2-9 after nonconference games, and most of those included slow starts,” said Sacred Heart coach Jessica Mannetti, in her 11th season. “We had to learn valuable lessons from not starting well. (After the first quarter tonight) I said, ‘We’ve been here before (with bad starts). Settle down, we are a little tight.’ We have to be better defensively to generate more offense. And those back-to-back 3s by Amelia Wood were huge.”
Sacred Heart broke out offensively in the second quarter. Pryor’s dribble drive to the paint resulted in a bucket off the glass and an 18-16 lead midway through the second. That was part of a 10-0 run that ended with Sacred Heart scoring 21 of the 25 points in the quarter to take a 3320 lead into halftime. The NEC champs never looked back.
SHU, despite going 3 for 21 beyond the arc, never stopped playing aggressive basketball in the second half while protecting the lead. The Pioneers only tallied 24 points in the second half, but their defense stepped it up a notch. Sacred Heart caused 20 turnovers and had 10 steals in the game.
“I am so proud of our team’s effort. It was a true battle tonight. I am so proud of how our team rallied to make history tonight,” Mannetti said.
On paper, this was an evenly matched contest featuring teams meeting for the first time. Both entered the game with 18 wins, including 12 in conference play, while the Pios (now 1-3 in the NCAAs) and Jags (0-6) were both riding fivegame win streaks.
“We just made history, and we are not done with this story,” said Pryor, the NEC Player, rookie and defensive player of the year.