Chapel Hill NC: The West Virginia Women’s Basketball Team will face the North Carolina Tar Heels at Carmichael Arena in Chapel Hill tonight at 7:00 p.m. on ESPN2. This comes after WVU’s decisive victory over Columbia Saturday Afternoon (78-59).
The Tar Heels are coming off a dominant victory of their own over Oregon State (70-49) where North Carolina led by only two points at halftime. Despite a close first half the Tar Heels were able to run away with the victory thanks to 19 points for Lexi Darnoski, 13 points from Maria Gakdeng, and 10 points for Alyssa Utsby.
During a press conference Sunday, Kyah Watson and JJ Quinerly were asked about North Carolina’s second half surge against Oregon State, they responded with the following
KYAH WATSON: I’ll just say that our defense, each quarter, especially after that half, has to be good. We have to kind of be playing together, make sure our press is effective and kind of causing chaos out there.
JJ QUINERLY: Same, to piggyback off of her. We’ve definitely got to rev up the pressure for sure. They have a lot of girls that can do a lot of things — shoot, drive — so we have to stay locked in and pressure them, try to make them make mistakes.
West Virginia and North Carolina have only met once before in the tournament with the Tar Heels winning the matchup on November 17, 1979
The Mountaineers enter the matchup against UNC with an opportunity to advance to the Sweet 16 for just the second time in program history. West Virginia’s only Sweet 16 appearance came in 1992, however, there were fewer teams in the tournament at the time and West Virginia was able to advance to the Sweet 16 with only one victory.
Read: Kellogg Praises His Team’s Performance In Joint Press Conference
Coach Kellogg On WVU’s First Sweet 16
“I think it was a shortened field back then, so they won one game, What we told (the team) is if we can win two in the tournament, we would be the first team in our school’s history to win two NCAA Tournament games.”
The Mountaineers find themselves in familiar territory as they were in this same position last season. West Virginia would defeat Princeton in the first round and go on to play the Iowa Hawkeyes led by Caitlyn Clark, the Mountaineers would go on to lose against Iowa.
Kellogg Comments On Last Season And This Season
“This is what we talked about a year ago, Obviously we were at Iowa and had a great game. It comes quick, but we’ll go prepare and have another opportunity in front of us to leave a legacy, and that’s what our kids want to do. It’s what you want to do as a coach.”
North Carolina’s Size Advantage
Much attention has been focused on North Carolina’s size advantage going into this matchup. JJ Quinerly responded in a press conference yesterday saying; “I think for us we just need to stay locked in, like I said, and we’ve got to go out there and play our game. They do have some bigs, but we played against bigs in the Big 12 all the time. We’re still going to do what we can do, regardless of their bigs”
