For the fourth time in as many years, the UTM women’s basketball team’s season has ended in the first round of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament.
In their last three trips, the Skyhawks took on Tennessee, Duke and Notre Dame, respectively. This year, the Skyhawks entered with a program-high No. 13 seed and took on the No. 4 seed North Carolina Tar Heels on their home court in Chapel Hill, N.C.
After leading for a majority of the game, and building up as much as an 18-point lead with 10:51 left in the second half, UTM was unable to stop UNC from completing the comeback to advance in the tournament.
Over the remaining 10 minutes, the Tar Heels went on a 28-8 run to pull ahead of the Skyhawks by two points.
Prior to the start of the second half, the scoreboard would be lowered and cause for a nine minute delay in the action. This would not be the only incident to stall the game.
With 18 seconds left, and the Skyhawks driving the ball down the court, an announcement was made that the campus was being placed on lockdown because of “an armed and dangerous person.”
An announcement that UNC students had been made aware of much earlier in the second half by an automatic text sent out by the University.
Seconds after, it was announced that the suspect was in custody and the brief lockdown ended.
This forced the Skyhawks to call back-to-back timeouts while trying to prepare their last chance at a comeback.
Trailing 60-58, Jasmine Newsome drove toward the goal before passing to Karisma Tyson.
This was a play the team had run before. As the end of the first half of the OVC Tournament Championship was drawing close, Newsome had kicked the ball out to Tyson, who hit a three-point shot as time expired. In similar fashion, with the clock winding down against the Tar Heels, Newsome once again passed the ball to Tyson, who once again shot a three-pointer as time was expiring.
However, this buzzer-beater shot didn’t go Tyson’s way, and the Tar Heels advanced to take on Michigan State.
“I felt like we played way better than we have been all season,” said Heather Butler. “We fought, and it’s just really hard to lose that ball game when I know we deserved it you know. We deserved it. We fought so hard and just had it in our hands and there it went. It hurts and it’s going to hurt probably for the rest of my life but you know that’s the way it goes sometimes.”
Butler finished her last game as a Skyhawk with a game-high 19 points. She also added a game-high three three-pointers, which tied the NCAA record for career three-point field goals made with 392 set by Kansas State’s Laurie Koehn from 2002-05.
“I thought [Newsome and Butler] controlled the game and we needed it,” said McMillan. “We needed a loose ball, we needed a layup, we needed to get on the foul line one more time, and we needed one other little thing to happen and not a scoreboard coming down, and not an emergency management system popping in, and not going to the monitor. We didn’t need those but I thought overall we did just about everything that we could do in that ball game.”
The end of the season not only marks the best record in program history for the Skyhawks, who finish 24-8, but marks the end of an era in UTM women’s basketball as well.
Newsome, Butler and Megan White all leave the program as some of the most decorated athletes to set foot on UTM’s campus. In their four years, they have won a total of 87 games, two OVC championships, four OVC Tournament championships and been to four straight NCAA Tournaments.
Feature photo credit: Bradley Stringfield
