The MAC has one team ( Buffalo) in the NCAA and 5 teams ( Ohio, Toledo, Ball State, Kent State, and Akron. It is noteworthy that Kent State, who did not qualify for the MAC tournament with the #9 seed, made the WNIT, which is a 64 teams tournament with games played on home courts.
Buffalo plays Tennessee on the Vols homecourt Saturday at 3:00 on ABC ( which is a first for Buffalo women). Although Tennessee is second in the nation with 8 National Championships, it is worth noting that Ball State women beat them in Knoxville in the tournament a few years ago.
WNIT
Wednesday March 16
5:30 Kent State at Youngstown State ESPN3
8:00 Ball State at Marquette
Thursday March 17
7:00 Akron at Wake Forest ACC Xtra
8:00 Ohio at South Dakota State
Friday March 18
7:00 Houston Baptist at Toledo ESPN3
Kent State, who did not make the MAC tournament with 18-11 ( 10-10) record and two power conference road wins, beat 24-6 Youngstown State on the road. Their probable next game will be at Toledo, although UT still has to win Friday night and get chosen for the home game.
lol…Well for the first 43 years of my life, they were Warriors, and we used to play them fairly often in the NCAA. Their chant was Warriors, Warriors, and then a few drum beats, over and over.
Toledo went to Marquette and beat them with Quinesha Lockett scoring 21 4th quarter points on the way to 37. Megan Duffy was 3-0 vs Tricia Cullop while at Miami, but this was a huge win for Toledo. They were the only road team to win in round 3 of the WNIT and will host Middle Tennessee State ( who has won 3 home games in a row) in the quarterfinals on Monday night.
Dayton Coach Shauna Greene took the open job at Illinois last week, and today UD announced that Tamika Williams Jeter would be their new coach ( notice how quickly they filled the opening, it really helps with transfer portal and hiring a new staff issues). Anyway, Williams- Jeter was a high school All American at Chaminade-Julienne who played for UConn and had recently been the head coach at Wittenberg. There is a Miami connection as her older brother Mike Williams played on a MAC championship team at Miami in the early 90’s and I remember seeing her and her parents at some Miami games when she was a very tall, athletic looking Jr high student.
This is a huge loss for Buffalo, overall the best program in the MAC for the last 6 or 7 years. Buffalo has returning the MAC POY Daisha Fair who was third in the nation in scoring and has 2 years of remaining eligibility and MAC FOY Georgia Woolley ( an Aussie). Will they go with her or enter the transfer portal??
I believe her “personality” was too strong and clashed with higher-ups.
This is a problem at a few schools. Coaches are mostly alpha-DNA types and many administrators do not like to be exposed as “weak” so they tend to hire “passive…don’t rock the boat” types of coaches who they know they can control (while also likely not to be ideal coaches) and the rest is history. Mediocrity assured, Higher powers happy. Fans PO’ed.
Yeah Grumpy I should have looked it up before commenting…your post got me to take a peek. She had 10 years with a winning record and 5 years with a losing record…did win over 20 games three times.
The program was not in a good place when she got released. We had just graduated two of the best players in Miami history ( all time leading scorer and rebounder) and had accomplished nothing with them and the roster lacked talent going forward. David Saylor was not around when Maria had her best seasons and what he saw in his early years here was not good. Coach Bryant took over a pretty weak roster and had to rebuild the talent.
I liked Maria and think she was and is a good coach. I think maybe she became too comfortable and somewhat complacent, especially in her last couple of years when the talent of her recruits fell off.
MAC women’s teams went 6-7 in the postseason. MAC men were 1-4. I think it has been around 20 years since Miami women won a single post season game. We beat Xavier at Xavier under Maria F.