Despite Marshall’s big game, Miami women’s basketball falls to NC State in ACC tournament final
Katie Meier saw the emotional drain in her team on Sunday. In one case, that’s bound to be expected as the Miami Hurricanes women’s basketball team played its fourth game in as many days, looked for its third upset victory in as many days and strove to achieve something it never had accomplished in program history.
The magic ran out.
Despite 24 points from Kelsey Marshall, the seventh-seeded Hurricanes fell 60-47 to the top-seeded North Carolina State Wolfpack on Sunday in the ACC Tournament championship at the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The Hurricanes held the Wolfpack to their fourth-lowest scoring output of the season and had a 24-18 edge in points in the paint, but two long Miami scoring droughts in the second and third quarters were enough for NC State to take a double-digit lead and never look back en route to its third consecutive conference championship.
“If you’re ever going to have an empty fuel tank,” Meier said, “I guess it is on the fourth day after playing three amazing teams to get here and then playing the best team in the conference on the last day and asking your kids to defend their brains out. At some point, emotionally, on the offensive end, we got really empty. There’s no other way to say it.”
The glass-half-empty look at the outcome: Miami missed an opportunity at history. The Hurricanes had the chance to win their first-ever ACC Tournament title, become the lowest seed to ever win the tournament and be the first team to knock out each of the tournament’s top three seeds on their path to the championship. They came one step short of accomplishing that.
The glass-half full look: Miami (20-12) all but cemented its status in the upcoming NCAA tournament.
The Hurricanes, winners of eight of their last 10 games after starting the season 12-10, will be dancing when the 68-team field is announced on March 13, and their stock improved mightily thanks to their four-game performance in the ACC Tournament. ESPN had Miami as a No. 9 seed entering Sunday, a projection that will likely hold.
“Nobody thought we would make it this far,” Marshall said, “and we did. Extremely proud of my team. We never gave up. We never fought. We came in as underdogs and we showed people that we’re not underdogs anymore.”
The run to get to the ACC Tournament championship showed the Hurricanes’ potential.
After earning a first round bye, Miami used a 22-point fourth quarter to beat No. 10 seed Duke 61-55 on Thursday in the tournament’s second round after trailing by four at halftime and one going to the fourth quarter.
The Hurricanes then upset No. 2 seed Louisville 61-59 in the quarterfinals on Friday by scoring 17 unanswered points to close the game, with Destiny Harden scoring the final 15 points by herself, including a buzzer-beating, turnaround jumper.
And then Miami beat third-seeded Notre Dame 57-54 in the semifinals on Saturday behind a team-high 18 points from Marshall to advance to the tournament title game for the first time in program history to face NC State.
“Is that like a going to the Final Four-type scenario?” Meier asked. “What a ridiculous bracket we were in [for the ACC Tournament] and we performed and performed and performed.”
That’s where the magic ended, though.
Miami stayed close with NC State (29-3), the No. 3 team in the country, for the first 15 minutes and had a 23-22 lead before NC State used a 10-0 run to go up 32-23 at halftime.
The deficit grew to 18 points, 51-33, at the end of the third quarter after Miami shot made just 3 of 14 shots from the field. It peaked at 21 points, 54-33, in the early minutes of the fourth Miami narrowed the gap to as few as 11 points with 2:06 left in the quarter but couldn’t get any closer.
“The third-quarter run was rough on us,” Meier said, “and they kind of broke us. We never went away, but NC State is so phenomenal.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2022 at 1:56 PM.
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