Miami grabs Bulls by horns, eliminates USF from NCAA women’s tournament
To everything, there is a season: a time to coach and a time to let your players go to work.
Miami coach Katie Meier learned she had to do the latter. Instead of calling sets like she usually does, Meier obliged her team’s request to let it go.
“I have 1,000 pages of plans, but I had to coach what I saw,” she said, “and I saw my players going, ‘Come on, Coach, come on, Coach,’ so I let them take over a little bit.”
Take over they did.
The eighth-seeded Hurricanes had five double-digit scorers and opened the NCAA Women’s Tournament with a 78-66 win over No. 9 seed South Florida on Friday at Colonial Life Arena in Columbia, S.C.
Miami (21-12) has now won five of its past six games and will face top-seeded South Carolina in Sunday’s Round of 32 contest.
The Hurricanes only trailed in Friday’s contest for 12 seconds after Elena Tsineke made a free throw to open the game. The Bulls’ guard tallied a game-high 21 points, 17 of which came in the first half.
Miami answered back, however, with balanced scoring and led by as many as 19 late in the second quarter. Karla Erjavec was the team’s leading scoring with 14 points and shot 50% from both the field and three-point range.
“Honestly coming into the game, I really just tried to focus on the defensive end and let the game come to me,” Erjavec said. “In the second half when the game came to me, when I got open shots, I just knocked them down. They were going under some screens and I was just ready to shoot off of that and, the shots went in today.”
Meier referred to Erjavec and Kelsey Marshall, who had 12 points, as her Steady Eddies, but the difference was the Hurricanes’ bench, which contributed 29 points to USF’s nine bench points.
“We went six deep on our scout against Florida, and I’m sure that some of these people, like Lashae Dwyer wasn’t even in their scouting report,” Meier said. “We missed Shae a lot in the ACC tournament. She broke her nose in the first second she was in, so that had to be a big surprise.”
Dwyer, who came into the game averaging 3.5 points, scored all eight of her points in the first half to help Miami to a 44-33 halftime advantage.
USF tried to chip away at the lead and got within single digits during the second half, but the Hurricanes had an answer every time. Lola Pendande (11), Ja’Leah Williams (10) and Maeva Djaldi-Tabdi (10) rounded out the Hurricanes’ double-digit scorers with each adding to the Bulls’ defensive frustration.
“Every time,” USF coach Jose Fernandez echoed, “if we would stop Marshall and Erjavec then one of their bigs — we hit a three, we cut it down it seven, and then they come down and we rotate and one of their post players steps out, we don’t rotate it and hits a three from the top. That was huge.”
This story was originally published March 18, 2022 at 1:21 PM.
