The East Tennessee State women’s basketball team was hard at practice on Wednesday, and that in itself was an accomplishment.
The Bucs are hopeful their season didn’t end with a loss to Chattanooga in the semifinals of the Southern Conference tournament. ETSU will have to wait until Sunday night for the official word, but the team appears headed for the Women’s Basketball Invitational, an eight-team tournament being held March 17-19 in Lexington, Kentucky.
ETSU still harbors hopes of making the Women’s NIT, but that seems to be just out of reach for first-year coach Brenda Mock Brown’s squad, which has tied a school record with 23 victories this season.
Either way, just having a shot at the postseason is quite a feat for a team that went 6-22 last season.
“Over 200 women’s basketball teams are at home preparing for next year season,” Brown said after Wednesday’s practice. “Part of this is to prepare for the next season. We want this to be the expectation year after year, that we go to postseason. And obviously we’d love for that postseason to be the NCAA Tournament. That’s the ultimate prize. But where we are in the building stages of this program, we felt that taking any advantage of postseason was very, very important for the university.”
ETSU went into the SoCon tournament with momentum and rolled past Samford in its quarterfinal game. That brought up a matchup with Chattanooga, which had beaten the Bucs twice during the regular season. The Mocs won 69-40 as ETSU shot 1 for 11 in the second quarter and 2 for 11 in the fourth.
“I just sensed that after Friday that there was still work to be done with this team,” said Brown, who was chosen as the SoCon’s coach of the year after engineering the nation’s best turnaround. “I’m just delighted and grateful that that our administration supports us going to postseason and that I’ve got girls that are excited about it as well.”
The players seem to know they’re playing on house money these days, still working on their games, hopefully in preparation for an unknown opponent.
“Oh it’s great, because I know for the past two years our season would have been over,” said ETSU sophomore center Jakhyia Davis, who was a second-team all-tournament selection last week. “We’re still playing and it’s amazing. I know that we’re not finished. We still have more work to do.”
Any chance to play again would go a long way in getting rid of the bad feelings about losing to Chattanooga in a game that was never close after the first quarter.
“We’re using that as motivation, because that’s not the note that we wanted to end on,” Brown said. “Fortunately enough for us, we’ve played well enough to earn this postseason opportunity so that doesn’t have to be our final statement for the ’22-23 season. I’ll be honest with you. That was one of the tougher moments of the season on Friday, because we just didn’t play our best basketball and I didn’t coach my best basketball.”
The WBI guarantees every team three games in three days. The Bucs need one more win to be the first team in the program’s history to win at least 24, so they would get three chances at it.
“It would be huge because I know we broke a lot of history this year,” Davis said. “So it would be amazing to do that. It’s satisfying because I know that a lot of people didn’t expect us to be here, but we’re here now.”
The women’s NCAA bids come out Sunday evening, followed by the WNIT. The WBI field is expected to be announced shortly after that.
Joe Avento is the Sports Editor for the Johnson City Press and Kingsport Times News and has covered East Tennessee State University athletics and local golf since 1987.
