Ole Miss Women’s Basketball Season Comes to End after Second-Round Loss to Notre Dame
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Sometimes it is just not your day.
Ole Miss was within 40 minutes of consecutive Sweet 16 appearances in the NCAA Tournament, but an outstanding effort from Notre Dame ended the Rebels season with a 71-56 win for the Irish.
The Rebels finish the season 24-9.
In the box score, it was easy to see the difference in the game Monday. Notre Dame shot 50 percent from the floor, 44 percent from three-point land and 88 percent from the free-throw line. Ole Miss didn’t come close to that output and it did not help the Rebels committed 22 turnovers.
Still, in the postgame press conference, Ole Miss head coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin and players Madison Scott and Kennedy Todd-Williams were disappointed, but still had an eye to the future.
“You never want these moments to be in the way they are, especially when you’re on the losing end,” Coach McPhee-McCuin, affectionately known as ‘Coach Yo,'” said, “Especially when you don’t think your team displayed what they needed to display for 40 minutes, but nevertheless, super proud of our group, and grateful for this opportunity and this experience.”
Todd-Williams did reflect on a game the Rebels knew they were prepared for playing.
“Yeah, I think it was just about executing on both ends, getting stops. I don’t think we did a good job at getting stops to help with our offense. It’s just something that we have to be better at.“
Kennedy Todd-Williams
Almost as soon as she finished her statement, her teammate pointed to the future.
“We want to use the summer to get better,” Scott said.
“We just want to get better and work. This is hard. It hurts. It’s going to be on our minds for a while. But we’ve got to get back in the lab. We’ve got to get going. We’ve got to continue to build, because like Coach said, we’re a program now that we’re expected to go to the tournament every year. We’re expected to go to the Sweet 16 every year. We fell short, but me and Toddy are both returning. We’ll plan to use it as motivation, come back and be better, and yeah, just continue to get better and grow.”
Madison Scott
Both players confirmed they will take advantage of the Covid eligibility season to play next year.
Scott and Todd-Smith each finished with a team-high 15 points in the game.
Coach Yo was not happy with Monday’s outcome, but still looked at the bigger picture.
“I didn’t say I was disappointed with our performance this season,” Coach Yo reiterated. “I said I was disappointed that we didn’t get back to the Sweet 16 so that we could try to get another step ahead. If you’ve seen in the manner the program is built, we’ve gotten better every single year,” she added.
“Obviously there are things that we can celebrate from making history with 12 wins (in the SEC), finishing third place, so on and so forth, with no point guard. There are things that I want to celebrate for sure. I thought we did a good job because I know I’m disappointed and everybody else is because we didn’t come out and play in the manner we’ve been playing all season since we went on that seven-game winning streak.“
Coach Yo
This is the second straight year Ole Miss has had to play on another team’s court in the tournament. Last season, the Rebels knocked off Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., but this year fell short at Notre Dame.
That gives Coach Yo an idea for the future.
“We’ve got to figure out how to be a top-four seed, top-16, so we can have the home-court advantage,” Coach Yo said. “If you’re going to go in someone’s place and knock them off like we did last year, you need to have all cylinders clicking. We didn’t get to have that.”
Before she left the stage, the coach had to repeat how much she cared about her team.
“But yes, very proud of our team.” Coach Yo said. “Like I said, we have some historic things that we have done, and we’ve got a lot of people returning. Just going to look forward to the future.”
In the future, there will be some great days for Ole Miss women’s basketball.
Only Monday was just not one of them.
Steve Barnes
Steve Barnes joins The Rebel Walk staff as a senior writer and brings a trifecta of journalistic experience. As a writer, he has covered college sports for Rivals.com, Football.com and SaturdayDownSouth.com as well as served as a beat writer for various traditional newspapers.
He has been a broadcaster for arena football and several national tournament events for the National Junior College Athletic Association as well as hosting various shows on radio.
A former sports information director at Albany (Ga.) State University and an assistant at Troy and West Florida, he has helped host many NCAA conference, regional and national events, including serving five years on the media committee of the NCAA Division II World Series.
Barnes, a native of Pensacola, Fla., attended Ole Miss in 1983-84, where his first journalism teacher was David Kellum. The duo has come a long way since that time.
He will bring a proven journalistic track record, along with a knack for finding the out-of-the-ordinary story angles to The Rebel Walk.
Barnes continues to reside in Pensacola a mere ten minutes from the beach because he does have taste and a brain.
