The Jacks were defeated in the NCAA Tournament on Friday, March 20, by the Washington Huskies 72-54.
“Congratulations to Washington, I thought they played really well,” SDSU head coach Aaron Johnston said. “Watching them throughout the year and preparing for them today, I saw a team that was really impressive with how they played together.”
SDSU senior Brooklyn Meyer played her final game in a Jackrabbit uniform, and she showed out, scoring 29 points on 13-20 shooting from the floor and 3-3 from the free throw line. Meyer also led the team with seven rebounds.
The other two Jackrabbit seniors who played in their final games were Madison Mathiowetz and Ellie Colbeck.
“It’s hard to walk off knowing it’s your last time playing a sport that you’ve done for 10 or 15 years,” Colbeck said. “It becomes a big part of your life, so it is hard. But I felt honored by our fans; they traveled really well for us, supported us. Our families have been there for us through everything, every high and low in our careers, so just very thankful to have them with us here.”
Sophomore Emilee Fox also had a solid game, scoring 14 points, including 4-5 shooting from behind the arc. In total, Fox shot 5-8 from the floor against the Huskies.
The Jacks had no answer for Washington’s sophomore guard, Avery Howell, who dropped 30 points on 9-16 shooting from the floor, including 7-13 shooting from deep. Howell also grabbed nine rebounds in her performance.
The Jacks, who came into the tournament as the 11 seed, looked like they had a chance to pull the upset over the six-seeded Huskies early.
The Jacks took an early 13-3 lead with Meyer contributing seven of those points, then the Huskies went on a 9-0 run and cut the lead down to just one.
“We came out hot in a sense, and we hit some shots, got some stops on defense and then I thought we kind of just let up a little bit,” Mathiowetz said. “That allowed them to open it up and go on a run from there.”
Then by the end of the quarter, both teams found themselves tied at 15-15.
The Huskies opened the second quarter outscoring the Jacks 9-2 to take a 24-17 lead.
Fox responded with a three-pointer to cut the lead down to four points, but Washington didn’t slow down and scored 10 points straight to balloon the lead to 34-20.
The Huskies maintained the gap the rest of the quarter and went into halftime up 38-24 over the Jackrabbits.
SDSU came out in the second half and showed some life, cutting into the lead and putting the deficit at single digits with the score at 40-31.
Washington once again weathered the storm and pulled away to a 15-point advantage with just under seven minutes left in the third quarter.
“In the third quarter, I thought our offense picked back up,” Johnston said. “We settled down, stopped turning it over, we just made some simple plays, and it looked like we could get ourselves going offensively. But then we just couldn’t stop (Washington).”
At the end of the third, the Jacks trailed 61-43 after being down as much as 21 points in the quarter.
The two teams broke even in the fourth quarter, and the Huskies were able to end the game with an 18-point win with a score of 72-54.
After the game, Johnston talked about how the three seniors can still impact the team after they’re gone.
“I really hope (the less experienced players) learned as much as they could from our seniors,” Johnston said. “I really hope they watched Brooklyn, Maddie and Ellie approach every day in practice and how competitive those three are. How driven they are, how they take care of themselves, how they prepare for games. There are just so many lessons I hope they learned from those seniors because they are exactly what we want from seniors.”
