NC State women's basketball makes NCAA Tournament
NC State women’s basketball is headed to its sixth-consecutive NCAA Tournament, the selection committee officially announced Sunday night. The No. 7-seeded Wolfpack will face No. 10-seeded Princeton Friday, March 17, in Salt Lake City, Utah, for the round of 64 showdown.
Coming into this year’s tournament, NC State has advanced to at least the sweet 16 in each of the past four years, including a regional final appearance in 2022. To get to that point this year, the Wolfpack will have to defeat the Tigers in its opening game before likely facing No. 2-seeded Utah in the Greenville region’s round of 32.
Princeton goes into the NCAA Tournament with a 23-5 record and a 12-2 mark in the Ivy League. The Tigers won their conference tournament with a 54-48 win over Harvard in the league final.
NC State lost in the ACC Tournament to Notre Dame March 3. After playing the final section of its regular season and the conference tournament without All-ACC point guard Diamond Johnson, head coach Wes Moore shared an update on her status, as well as the program’s preparation plan for the trip to Salt Lake City.
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Wes Moore updates Diamond Johnson’s status after ACC Tournament
After the loss, Wolfpack head coach Wes Moore talked about Johnson’s availability going forward and how the program will approach NCAA Tournament prep.
“That’s the plan,” Moore said when asked if Johnson will be available for the Pack’s next game.
“By not playing her the tournament, you basically gave her two more weeks off because, next week, we’ll [have] a practice or two, but we can sit her out of that and give her a full three weeks, but we’ll see. Who knows. It’s been a lingering thing and, at some point, it’s kind of up to her.”
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With a lengthy 9-day gap between NC State’s conference tournament and selection Sunday, Moore shared the program’s preparation schedule.
“We’re going to give them a few days off, and then we’ll get back,” Moore said. “It’ll be good to have a few practices where we can focus on us before we find out who our opponent is, so we’ll probably do that. We’ll probably come in maybe middle of the week, lift weights, shoot and then start practice. We’ll probably practice a couple of days, take a day off and then, next Sunday, we’ll find out who we’re playing, and we’ll have a few practices where we can focus on that.”
NC State will play in the 2023 NCAA Tournament with likely its lowest seeding since 2017. Moore said he is unsure if the Wolfpack will feed off of the energy of the program’s doubters.
“I don’t know,” Moore said. “We came into this tournament as an underdog, and maybe I didn’t stress that enough, but you look at our bracket— We beat Notre Dame earlier, we beat Louisville earlier, so you felt like ‘Hey, you’ve got a chance.’ And, obviously, we didn’t have Diamond this week, but we felt like we could come in here and and make some noise, and so it was really disappointing that we didn’t.”
