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INDIANAPOLIS — For just the third time in school history, the Iowa women’s basketball team (19-12) is heading to the Big Ten championship game.
The third-seeded Hawkeyes defeated second-seeded and 23rd-ranked Michigan State (22-9), 59-54, in Conseco Fieldhouse on Saturday.
Iowa scored less than 60 points for the first time in 13 games, but with the win, head coach Lisa Bluder found little to be disappointed in.
“Everybody talks about our offense,” the 10th-year coach said. “We feel good about our offense. But it’s kind of nice to win a low-scoring game where maybe our offense wasn’t there all the way. So I’m happy with that.”
Iowa once again had balanced scoring from its players. Junior Kachine Alexander had a double-double with 14 points and 10 rebounds, and sophomore Kamille Wahlin had 13 points in the win.
The freshmen were key contributors for the Hawkeyes as well. Trisha Nesbitt and Jaime Printy added 10 points a piece, while Morgan Johnson had six points and three blocks. Those blocks gave her 76 on the season, a new school single-season record.
Michigan State senior Aisha Jefferson paced the Spartans with 23 points on 10-of-16 shooting.
The Hawkeyes trailed 26-25 at halftime. However, during the second half, both teams traded off points. With 1:02 remaining in the game, Wahlin launched a 3-pointer to give Iowa a 55-52 lead. The squad wouldn’t trail again.
Despite being just 1-of-5 from beyond the arc, Wahlin said it didn’t faze her when shooting the basket.
“When it comes down to crunch time, you just forget about all the other shots you miss and you just try to step up and knock it down for your teammates,” she said. “I was thankful it went in. My thinking was just to be confident and be ready to shoot it.”
While it was Wahlin’s 3-pointer with 1:02 remaining that gave the Hawkeyes the lead, Alexander’s four free throws in the final minute sealed the victory.
After getting tangled with Michigan State players, the Minneapolis native hit the floor hard — suffering a bloody lip as a result. However, instead of being taken out, she hid the severity of the injury from referees.
“I was swallowing a lot of blood,” Alexander said. “The ref saw it get on my hand and he said, ‘we’ve got blood.’ I had to hold it in and try not to let them see I was really bleeding.”
Bluder commended her players for their clutch free-throw shooting — saying they had the “right people taking them” — after the team went 13-of-14 against Michigan State, and 21-of-22 in their quarterfinal victory over Penn State on Friday.
The last time Iowa made it to the championship game, they won the entire tournament in 2001. After starting the season 1-6 and winning nine out of their last eleven games, the Hawkeyes clinched the third seed for this year’s tournament.
“Everything that we’ve been through, it’s so rewarding because we worked so hard,” Printy said. “But we don’t want to stop now. We want to win [the championship], so we’re going to come out ready to play.”
— by Evelyn Lau
