In the First Four, Southern will try for its first win in the NCAA women’s tournament

The Southern women’s basketball team is headed to Palo Alto, California, where it will play Sacred Heart in a First Four game in the NCAA tournament.

The Jaguars are a co-No. 16 seed and play Wednesday against the co-No. 16 Pioneers, winners of the Northeast Conference tournament. The winner will advance to play Stanford (28-5), the No. 1 seed in the Seattle 4 bracket, on Friday.

“It’s all so exciting because of the girls,” Southern coach Carlos Funcess said. “It’s exciting to see all the hard work they put in result in a championship, and now they’re going to the NCAA tournament.”

The NCAA tournament appearance is the fourth for Sacred Heart (18-13). The Pioneers were seeded second in the NEC tournament and defeated Fairleigh Dickinson 72-60 on Sunday in the championship game.

Southern (18-14) has won nine of its last 10 games and is in the NCAA tournament for the sixth time. The Jaguars won three games in three days over the weekend to secure an automatic bid with their first Southwestern Athletic Conference tournament title since 2019.

The Jaguars’ tournament run began with a 64-37 blowout win over Prairie View — the Panthers’ worst loss in seven years. Southern followed that up with one of the program’s most exciting wins Friday.

Trailing Jackson State by five points, Southern made three 3-pointers in the final 13 seconds to overcame the top-seeded Tigers 65-64. In Saturday’s championship game, Southern outscored No. 7-seeded Arkansas-Pine Bluff by 12 points in the fourth quarter of its 62-53 win.

“We have a very experienced team,” Funchess said. “We’ve been up in the second half of games; we’ve been down in some. So (for) any scenario, I thought we were prepared. We did a good job keeping our poise. We were playing good defense, rebounding, and then taking good shots on offense.”

One of Southern’s most experienced players is fifth-year senior Amani McWain, who was a freshman on the Jaguars’ 2019 squad that went to the NCAA tournament. McWain leads Southern with 61 3-pointers and averages 9.3 points per game.

Genovea Johnson, who leads Southern in scoring at 11.4 points, was fearless in taking the ball to the basket at the SWAC tournament.

Sacred Heart, which has won five straight games, is led by 5-foot-3 guard Ny’Ceara Pryor, who averages 18.2 points and 6.8 rebounds. She also leads the team with 131 assists.