Connecticut’s women’s basketball team capped off a historic season with an 82-51 win over Syracuse in the championship game of the 2016 NCAA tournament on Tuesday night.
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The Notre Dame Fighting Irish have tried (and failed) to stop Stewart and the Huskies in back-to-back title games, but the lanky forward’s guardlike skill set has made slowing down UConn a hard feat at any point in the season.
UConn scored the first nine points, needed less than six minutes to take a double-digit lead and spent most of the rest of the game pulling away for an unprecedented fourth consecutive national championship with an 82-51 victory in Indianapolis.
STORRS, Conn. (AP) – UConn will skip its parade around campus because of unseasonably cold weather and rally indoors to celebrate its national champion women’s basketball team. To put that in present-day perspective, Mike Krzyzewski, the men’s all-time wins leader with a 970-262 record, has coached five championship teams in 36 seasons at Duke. It’s like in recruiting, when you see a kid too much: You start to pick apart her game and question what she can’t do instead of appreciating everything she’s doing right, and well.
The win gives Auriemma the most college basketball titles of all time, surpassing UCLA men’s coach John Wooden.
Simply put, should Syracuse topple UConn, it would be one of the biggest upsets in USA sports history. “Geno’s a great coach, he knows players and he knows Xs and Os”, one source with knowledge of Auriemma’s thinking said. “We had a goal coming in as freshmen and now as seniors we did that”. It walked in 30-7, having won its five games in the tournament by an average of 17 points and with an upset of No. 1 SC.
“The game is growing, whether people want to say it is or not”, Mulkey said. She and fellow seniors Morgan Tuck and Moriah Jefferson posed on a ladder after cutting down the net for the final time.
“That’s kind of a really good thing to forget”, Gabby Williams said. Geno Auriemma’s Huskies have won four consecutive National Championships and 10 since the year 2000.
Any hope the Orange had of tightening the deficit with pressure defense quickly faded when the Huskies were so adept at breaking it. They turned the ball over six times in the first half and shot 16 for 31 to take a 50-23 lead. Head coach Quentin Hillsman and coaching staff Ryan Nichols, Vonn Read, Tammi Reiss and Cedric Solice inspired these players to reach deep into themselves and find resources they probably never knew they had. They were also without their top 3-point shooter, freshman Katie Lou Samuleson, who injured her foot in the semifinal against Oregon State. They almost matched that total in the first half and wound up combining for 23.
Ultimately, legacies are built in March and April, something Stewart seemed to understand four years ago.
“We’ve lost by single digits”, Hillsman said.
Cornelia Fondren led the Orange (30-8) with 16 points.
UConn star Morgan Tuck was honored Wednesday during UConn’s national championship homecoming rally after announcing she will forgo an extra year of eligibility and make herself available for the WNBA draft.
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With Syracuse’s blowout, it marked the first time since 1995 – and only the third time in Final Four history – that each of the two games were decided by 20 or more points.
