The Saint Louis University women’s basketball team earned a post season bid to the Women’s National Invitational Tournament, despite losing in the first round of the Conference USA to Louisville 86-59.
The women’s basketball team will face the Iowa Hawkeyes of the Big Ten Conference. This is the first time that the women’s basketball team has been invited to play in a post-season tournament.
“I am really excited to get a second chance after losing to Louisville,” said senior guard Harmonie King. “I am feeling really good and confident about getting to play in a post-season tournament.”
The first round game of the conference tourney did not turn out for the Bills the way they had hoped. After beating the Cardinals just less than a week before the tournament, the Bills found the tables turned, and lost in the first round.
The Bills came out with the first points of the game, but with the score tied early on, the Cardinals went on a 17-3 run, taking a 21-7 lead. With 5:13 left in the half, the Billikens came within seven points, but another run by the Cardinals left the Bills down 41-23 at the end of the first half.
“We didn’t come out with an edge or a desire to beat them,” King said of the lackluster effort.
For the second half the Cardinals continued to build their lead and at one point held a 32-point advantage.
“Our start of the game was bad, we had turnovers galore, everything we did was bad,” said King.
Jana Haywood led the Bills with 14 points, while King added 13 points of her own.
For Louisville, both Sara Nord and Angel Bradley had 17 points, and Lori Nero had a game-high 20 points. The Bills shot only 38.5 percent from the field while the Cardinals shot 48 percent. Louisville shot 73 percent from the free-throw line to Saint Louis shooting only 54 percent. SLU also had 20 turnovers to the Cardinals 13.
Louisville went on to play DePaul and losing 66-57. The C-USA champion was TCU with a victory over Cincinnati 85-76 in overtime.
This season the league had five teams making it to the NCAA tournament: TCU as the C-USA Tournament champions, Charlotte as regular season champions, while Tulane, Cincinnati and DePaul received at-large bids. C-USA also has two teams in the WNIT post season tournament, Saint Louis and Marquette.
The Billikens look to bounce back from their C-USA disappointment tonight in the first round of the WNIT. They travel to Iowa to play the Hawkeyes tonight at 7 p.m.
“We watched tapes and went over scouting reports, we are ready to play,” King said. If the Bills win tonight’s game they would play the winner of the Toledo/Marquette game.
The Bills finished 17-13 in regular season play and they were 8-6 in the conference. This was the most conference wins ever for the women’s basketball team.
