Fresno prepares to host NCAA women's tourney

Fresno State welcome eight teams for first and second round NCAA tournament games at the Save Mart Center

By NATHAN HATHAWAY

The Save Mart Center will be welcoming the nation’s No. 1 women’s basketball team to Fresno this week.

Or is it No. 2?

Stanford, the nation’s top team in both major polls two weeks in a row, headlines this weekend’s NCAA women’s basketball tournament regional.

Strangely, however, the top team in the nation didn’t get a No. 1 seed in the tournament. The Cardinal (29-2, 17-1 Pac-10) drew a No. 2 seed in the Kansas City region, behind top seed Michigan State. The Spartans are No. 6 in the most recent national rankings.

“A long time ago, I stopped trying to figure out the committee and seeds. What's much more important to me is our team being healthy and coming out and playing well,” Stanford coach Tara VanDerveer, the Pac-10 coach of the year, said in a news release. “Our situation, the numbers are irrelevant. It's getting there. We're going to Fresno, which is good for us in terms of our fans being able to come, and then Kansas City. We want to get there and do our very best.”

Stanford, which ended the season on a 20-game winning streak, is led by freshman Candice Wiggins, the Pac-10 player of the year.

Wiggins averaged 17.3 points per game this season and became the first freshman to be named Pac-10 women’s player of the year.

Stanford takes on West Coast Conference champion Santa Clara in the firstround.

The Broncos will look familiar to Fresno State fans. The Bulldogs beat 15th-seeded Santa Clara two years running, and Broncos coach Michelle Bento-Jackson is an alumna of Fresno State.

A fun storyline to the Stanford-Santa Clara matchup will be the showdown of sisters Sebnem and Yasemin Kimyacioglu. Sebnem is a senior forward for the Cardinal, and Yasemin is a sophomore guard for Santa Clara.

“I thought we may both end up in Fresno, but I really didn't expect to play them in the first round,” Sebnem said in a news release. “But we're both really good competitors and we're going to come out there with our A-game.”

In the all-time series between Stanford and Santa Clara, the Cardinal has won eight of the past nine meetings. This will be the first time the teams have met in the postseason.

Another top-25 team playing in Fresno this weekend is No. 11 Notre Dame, which comes in as the four-seed in the Tempe (Ariz.) region. Notre Dame is one of three top-25 teams playing in Fresno.

The Irish (26-5, 13-3 Big East), led by All-America candidates Jacqueline Batteast and Megan Duffy, will take on fellow All-America candidate Kristen Mann and the UC-Santa Barbara Gauchos.

Batteast was named the Big East Conference player of the year after averaging 17 points. Duffy led the conference in steals and finished second in assists.

Notre Dame had wins this season against top 10 programs Duke, Rutgers and Connecticut.

UCSB’s Mann is an All-American candidate for the second straight year. Mann, a 6-foot-2 forward, averaged 19.9 points and 9.5 rebounds in leading the Gauchos (21-8, 16-2 Big West) to a conference championship.

Notre Dame and UCSB have played only once before, in 1997, when the Irish won 86-75.

The other game in the Tempe regional is fifth-seeded Arizona State, the No. 27 team in the country, against 12th-seeded Eastern Kentucky.

The Sun Devils, the host team of the Tempe region, earned an at-large bid to the tournament, their sixth trip all-time, after falling to Stanford in the Pac-10 championship game Saturday.

Eastern Kentucky (23-7, 15-1 Ohio Valley) won the Ohio Valley Conference tournament, earning an automatic bid. The Colonels are riding a 15-game winning streak.

All-Pac-10 forward Emily Westerberg leads the Sun Devils with 11.1 points per game. Miranda Eckerle’s 15.5 points and 7.1 rebounds per game lead the Colonels.

Arizona State and Eastern Kentucky face off for the first time in the programs’ history, but the Sun Devils hold a 2-0 record all-time against teams from the Ohio Valley Conference.

The fourth game in the Fresno regional will pit seventh-seeded Iowa State — the 19th ranked team in the country — against Mountain West Conference runner-up and 10th-seeded Utah.

Utah joins Stanford (Wiggins), Notre Dame (Batteast and Duffy) and UCSB (Mann) in bringing All-American candidates to Fresno. The Utes’ Shona Thornburn and Kim Smith are also finalists for All-American honors.

The Utes (25-7, 12-3 MountainWest) lost to New Mexico in the final of the Mountain West tournament Saturday.

The Cyclones (23-6, 12-4 Big 12), meanwhile, fell in the quarterfinals of the Big 12 Conference tournament to Texas Tech.

Smith and Thornburn combine to score 33.2 points and pull down 15.4 rebounds per game this season. All-Big 12 selection Anne O’Neil leads the Cyclones with 16.7 points per game.

The Utes hold a 3-0 record all-time against Iowa State, including a win in the first round of the 1997 NCAA tournament regional.

Another storyline of the regional is Iowa State head coach Bill Fennelly returning to Fresno, where he served as an assistant to Fresno State women’s coach Bob Spencer for five years in the ’80s.

The winner of the Utes-Cyclones matchup will face either Stanford or Santa Clara on Monday.

All games will be televised on either ESPN or ESPN2.