Sometimes basketball is pleasing to watch, especially the way the UConn women usually play it.
Monday night?
“You know, sometimes we forget that basketball is a game that involves a lot of contact,” UConn Coach Geno Auriemma said after the No. 2-seeded Huskies’ 52-47 win over No. 7 UCF in the second round of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament. “Each game, there’s the difference in what constitutes contact and how much contact, what kind of contact.
“There’s times when you’re just in a rock fight and you’ve just got to figure out a way to get through it. And there’s other times where it feels like you’re at a ballet and nobody’s touching nobody. And everything is cool. You shoot, I shoot, you shoot, I shoot.”
“We knew it was going to be like that from the tip-off,” said UConn senior guard Christyn Williams, who scored 13 points. “It was going to be an aggressive game and a physical game. And we just fought back. That was the only thing we really could do was just hold our own and fight back. And that’s exactly what happened, we just kept on throwing punches and eventually they backed down.”
So UConn survived to advance to its NCAA-record 28th consecutive Sweet 16. The Huskies will play No. 3 seed Indiana in the Bridgeport Region semifinals on Saturday at 2 p.m. at Webster Bank Arena.
The Hoosiers, also advanced Monday with a 56-55 win over Princeton, the Ivy League champions coached by former Husky Carla Berube. The word “toughness” came up in their postgame, too.
Like UConn, Indiana faced adversity during the season with key injuries, including forward and former Gorham High star MacKenzie Holmes, a COVID pause and a jam-packed schedule late in the season.
“There’s just a toughness about this group, and we knew that it was going to be a fight,” Indiana Coach Teri Moren said. “But we wanted to make sure that we brought the fight to Princeton, and we dictated how the game was going to be played. By God, we had to go all the way down to the end with them, but at the end of the fourth quarter, it’s the fight that won the game. They’ve showed that throughout.”
Along with Holmes, Grace Berger, Indiana’s 6-foot senior guard who averages 16.3 points and shoots 45.2 percent from the field, will be the Hoosiers’ must-stop offensive player for the Huskies.
FLORIDA STATE: Sue Semrau, the longest-tenured head coach in the Atlantic Coast Conference and Florida State’s all-time winningest coach, announced her retirement.
Semrau’s record at FSU was 470-271 and she led the Seminoles to 14 20-win seasons, including a string of eight straight from 2012 to 2020. Her teams made 16 NCAA tournaments and reached the Elite Eight three times.
SOUTH CAROLINA: The athletic department said Tuesday it is raising season ticket prices for women’s basketball on the 13,784 non-student seats at Colonial Life Arena for the 2022-23 season. About 4,000 seats at the 18,000 capacity arena are for South Carolina students, whose tickets are paid through athletic fees as part of tuition.
Prices for general admission season tickets in the upper tier, affecting 5,776 seats, will rise $10 to $55. Reserved seating prices in the upper tier will go from $45 to $85, affecting 876 seats.
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