The Kentucky women’s basketball team heard about Hampton through
the college basketball grapevine. And on Saturday at the Pit, the
fourth-seeded Wildcats got the privilege of meeting the 13thseeded Lady Pirates in the first round of the women’s NCAA tournament. The small school from the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference gave Kentucky all it could handle in 40 minutes of hard-nosed basketball — and then some — but the Wildcats escaped with a thrilling 66-62 overtime
victory.
“I’ve heard of Hampton before,” Kentucky senior Keyla Snowden said. “I think that they came out and played really aggressive, and their defense really got them going.”
Snowden tied a game-high 19 points that helped fend o# the Lady Pirates’ upset bid.
Under head coach David Six, Hampton proved it was no pushover. The second-year coach l ed Hampton to back-to-back MEAC tournament
championships and told his players that the winning formula involved
three things: Playing defense, rebounding and managing the ball. Hampton played stingy defense.
The Lady Pirates, who allowed 51.3 points per game and rode a 13-game winning streak into the tournament, limited Kentucky to 34 percent from the field.
They also owned the boards; Hampton out-rebounded the Wildcats
45-40 in the contest. Managing the ball was another thing: the Lady Pirates dictated the tempo, but turned the ball over 17 times.
The Lady Pirates, led by junior point guard Jericka Jenkins, who played 43 minutes, took a 52-51 advantage with 6:22 left, after Jenkins hit a jumper.
Kentucky came back off a pair of free throws from forward Victoria
Dunlap that gave the Wildcats a 54-52 lead with 3:22 left.
Dunlap said she didn’t expect an easy opening-round win.
“Coach had told us that they were going to be a really aggressive team,” she said. “I had never played them before, but I had heard of them before … Any team coming into the tournament is not going to sit there and let somebody just beat you.”
Jenkins took that sentiment to heart, and she rallied the Lady Pirates despite Kentucky’s suffocating full court pressure. Both teams struggle to score at the end of regulation. The Wildcats took a four-point lead, but Jenkins hit a 2-point jumper to pull the Lady Pirates down two, and teammate Quanneisha Perry tied the game with a pair of free throws with 1:04 left. Kentucky’s Snowden had a chance to win the game at the end of regulation, but missed a layup.
Jenkins said that Kentucky’s endgame defense was hard to navigate.
They were denying hard the whole game,” she said. They were making
somebody else bring the ball up, and that made running the defense more difficult.”
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Hampton didn’t score until 41 seconds were left in overtime, and by that point, Kentucky was in the midst of a 7-0 run.
Kentucky head coach Matthew Mitchell said Hampton came prepared to play.
“They really gave us a tough, tough contest today, so my hat’s o# to Hampton,” Mitchell said. “I am extremely proud of the Kentucky team for finding a way to win this game.”
Hampton’s Choicetta McMillan scored the Pirates’ only overtime points. She hit a pair of 3-pointers in the “ nal 40 seconds and eventually cut Kentucky’s lead to 65-62 with 28 seconds left. But Hampton ran out of steam mentally and physically, Mc- Millan said.
“Emotions were running very high,” she said. “We wanted to win the game and for us to have been the “ first HBC (Historically Black College) to make it past the first round would have been tremendous for us.”
