FORT WORTH, TX ― Shea Ralph had no regrets about asking her stars to win a game for her.
Mikayla Blakes regretted that it came down to the play it did. With Vanderbilt basketball down two in its Sweet 16 matchup against Notre Dame at Dickies Arena on March 27, Blakes got the ball and saw a driving lane to the basket. But she lost control of the ball as she dribbled it to the basket for a turnover.
“I can’t perform for my team like that in a moment as big as this,” Blakes said of that play in No. 2 seed Vanderbilt’s 67-64 loss to No. 6 seed Notre Dame in the Women’s NCAA Tournament.
Hearing that, Ralph interjected.
“I’ll also say that obviously you want to be able to execute in the last possession of the game, and I think that’s what makes this game fun,” Ralph said. “But that’s not what lost us this game. We wouldn’t be here without her, so there are lots of things that we could have done a lot better throughout the course of that game in particular, but those two plays at the end we got two great shots. I’m putting the ball in her hands every single time, and that’s not why we lost the game.”
By one count, Blakes and Aubrey Galvan were outplayed by Notre Dame’s All-American Hannah Hidalgo. Hidalgo put up 31 points, 11 rebounds, 10 steals and seven assists, one of just two players to ever have a 30-point triple-double in the Women’s NCAA Tournament.
Blakes finished with 26 points, eight rebounds, three assists and three steals while Galvan had 24 points and seven rebounds, but Blakes shot 7-for-26 from the field while Galvan was 7-for-16 and added six turnovers. Hidalgo, by comparison, shot 14-for-25 and had three turnovers.
But Hidalgo impacted the rest of Vanderbilt’s roster more than she impacted the two guards. The Commodores committed a season-high 23 turnovers, but despite their shot volume, just eight of those were from Blakes and Galvan. The rest of the team committed 15 turnovers and attempted just 12 shots and three free throws. Blakes and Galvan did everything because they had to, and in the fourth quarter when Vanderbilt briefly took the lead, the two guards attempted or assisted on every basket.
For Hidalgo, that was part of the plan: You can’t stop Mikayla Blakes completely, but try to slow her down.
“(Hidalgo is) like a free safety out there,” Ralph said. “Just kind of looking around, and as soon as she sees your eyes on a person, she’s going to go get the ball. It’s impressive. Hopefully our players not only learned a little bit about how we can take better care of the ball, but also, that’s the kind of effort you need to win games like this.”
Blakes and Galvan are underclassmen and can return, but the Commodores will need to replace the other three members of their starting five as Ndjakalenga Mwenentanda, Sacha Washington and Justine Pissott are all seniors. Vanderbilt has 5-star recruit Olivia Jones coming in who should be another immediate scoring threat.
And Ralph has been in this situation before. As a player at UConn in 1999, Ralph said she went 2-for-12 and the 1-seed Huskies were upset by 4-seed Iowa State and went home. The next year, UConn won its second national championship.
“It fueled the fire inside of all of us that I don’t know that we would have gotten had we not faced that kind of adversity,” Ralph said. “Then playing the way that we did in that game, it sucked, it hurt, but it gave us something that we probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. … So I feel like this program is on the cusp of doing something really special, and this is just a step that we have to take in that direction. What I’m hearing from my players already is next year is going to be even more special.”
Aria Gerson covers Vanderbilt athletics for The Tennessean. Contact her at [email protected] or on X @aria_gerson.
Subscribe to Updates
Get the latest creative news from FooBar about art, design and business.
