With their first regular season conference championship in 31 years in hand, Southern California will turn its attention to the Big Ten tournament.
The second-ranked Trojans know winning that championship will be difficult.
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“The Big Ten tournament is three games in three days against NCAA Tournament quality teams,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb said in a phone interview Monday. “So it will be a challenge and there's no rest in between games.”
USC enters the tournament coming off a victory over rival and fourth-ranked UCLA on Saturday that clinched the regular season crown.
“Hopefully we're peaking at the right time,” Gottlieb said. “We're in a great place.”
The Trojans open up play on Friday against the winner of the Oregon-Indiana contest.
The Big Ten, like the other three major conferences, have their tournaments this week.
No. 5 South Carolina won a coin flip with top-ranked Texas to get the No. 1 seed in the SEC Tournament after the two teams finished tied atop the standings. N.C. State is the top team in the ACC with No. 6 Notre Dame the second seed. No. 8 TCU topped No. 17 Baylor on Sunday to win the Big 12 crown and earn the top seed in that tournament.
While all those teams are locks for the NCAA Tournament, this weekend is the final chance for some teams on the bubble to get quality wins to help them.
Triple-double rarity
Columbia players Kitty Henderson and Cecilia Collins accomplished an extremely rare feat last weekend when the teammates each had a triple-double. Henderson had hers against Brown on Friday while Collins had one less than 24 hours later against Yale.
It's only the second time that two different players from the same school had triple-doubles in back-to-back games according to Stats Perform. Jackson State accomplished the feat in 2003. Columbia has a shot to stand alone in the record books if a different player can do it Saturday night when the Lions face Cornell in their regular season finale. A win that day would also give Columbia its first outright Ivy League championship. The Lions shared the title the last two seasons.
It's only the second and third ones in school history. Henderson had 19 points, 12 rebounds, 10 assists, four steals and a turnover. The only other player in the past 25 years to have that same stat line in a game was her former teammate Kaitlyn Davis, who had Columbia's first-ever triple double.
NET ratings
The NCAA’s weekly NET rankings — one of the tools the selection committee uses to determine the NCAA Tournament bracket — remained constant with the top 10 staying the same. UConn was No. 1 followed by South Carolina, Texas, Notre Dame and UCLA. Southern California, which is second in the poll this week, was sixth.
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