The BulleTin • Sunday, March 21, 2021 B3
WOMEN’S NCAA TOURNAMENT BRACKET
Tournament
Continued from B1
History is on the side of the
top teams. A one or two seed
has won every women’s tourna-
ment title since 1997, including
the last eight by a No. 1.
Texas A&M coach Gary
Blair, who led the Aggies to the
2011 national championship,
said his advice is always to play
the game with “no fear”.
“That’s how you advance
in the NCAAs. If you come in
thinking that this team is No. 1
or No. 2, you have no chance,”
said Blair, whose Aggies are a
two-seed. “But if you come in
with a no-fear attitude, Cinder-
ellas happen all the time.
“I’ve been a lower-seeded
team at Arkansas. I’m still the
lowest-seeded team that ever
made the Final Four when I
was at Arkansas as a No 9 seed.
We had the opportunity out at
Stanford to see a No 16 beat a
No 1 … That’s always been a
Skiing
Continued from B1
As the first-run leader, Pin-
turault was the final starter in
the second run on Saturday af-
ternoon.
He had won the overall title
two minutes before he began
the run as Odermatt slipped
down the leaderboard.
Still, Pinturault delivered
a winning run to finish 0.20
seconds ahead of Filip Zub-
cic. Mathieu Faivre, the world
championships gold medal-
ist last month, was third, 0.21
back. Odermatt ended 1.28
back.
Pinturault also won the giant
seed, might be in the best po-
sition to overcome that. The
Cardinal spent nine weeks
away from home because of the
virus. If they can, VanDerveer
could win her first national
championship since 1992.
“I think it helps,” the Hall of
Fame coach said. “We’re used
to testing every day and used
to eating in our rooms. It has
prepared us for this. We’ve been
her done this, we can handle it.”
VanDerveer tells her players
their middle name has to be
“flexible.”
Some other things to watch
for in the tournament:
great teaching lesson to me.”
Even if that trend doesn’t
change, there are more teams
capable of pulling off upsets
and at least reaching the Final
Four especially since there were
fewer regular season games and
practices than there would be
during normal year.
The talent also seems to be
more spread out now.
A look at the AP All-Amer-
ica team and for the first time
ever there were 15 different
schools represented on it.
Throughout the season, the No.
1 team in the poll changed four
times— the second most all-
time. N.C. State and Stanford
both lost games to unranked
teams this season.
Also, with all the NCAA
Tournament being played on
neutral courts there’s a better
chance that there will be more
upsets as lower-seeded teams
won’t have to win on a high-
er-seeded squad’s homecourt to
advance to the Sweet 16.
Any team that will make a
deep run will have to deal with
the mental aspect as well. A
school that wins the national
championship will have spent
nearly three weeks in San Anto-
nio cooped up in their hotel.
Stanford, the overall No. 1
Fresh faces
There are a lot of talented
freshmen and sophomores who
are making their debuts in the
NCAAs. Iowa’s Caitlin Clark
led the nation in scoring at
26.7 points per game and Paige
Bueckers of UConn became
the third freshman to ever earn
first-team All-America honors.
slalom discipline title. The 100
points he earned with the win
overtook Odermatt, who held
a 25-point lead before racing.
“A bit sad now, but that’s it,”
said the 23-year-old Swiss. “It’s
a beautiful season for me, but
today I’m a bit frustrated.”
Long predicted to be the best
all-around skier, Pinturault
was runner-up in the past two
seasons.
He also had three third-
place finishes when now-re-
tired Austrian great Marcel
Hirscher was winning a record
eight straight titles from 2012
to 2019.
A 34th career win in World
Cup races lifted Pinturault out
of a tie with Bode Miller and
into eighth place on the men’s
all-time list.
Also Saturday:
Vlhova’s 6th-place finish
enough to claim overall title:
LENZERHEIDE, Switzerland
— Making history for her na-
tion, Petra Vlhova won the
women’s World Cup overall ti-
tle on Saturday as the first Slo-
vakian to be crowned the best
all-around skier.
Vlhova needed only a top-
14 finish in her specialist sla-
lom event, and placed a distant
sixth in a race that Katharina
Liensberger won by 1.24 sec-
onds.
“I won also for my country.
It means a lot” Vlhova said in
an interview with Austrian
broadcaster ORF. “I cannot be-
lieve it.”
The race win earned Liens-
berger the season-long disci-
pline title, edging Mikaela Shif-
frin who also placed second in
Saturday’s race. Michelle Gisin
was third, trailing Liensberger
by 1.95.
The result gave the 25-year-
old Vlhova an unbeatable lead
of more than 100 points in the
standings over Lara Gut-Beh-
rami. The Swiss racer, who won
the overall title in 2016, skips
slalom but will compete against
Vlhova in the season-ending
giant slalom on Sunday.
A first giant crystal globe
trophy for Vlhova offset let-
ting her lead slip in the slalom
standings.
She dropped to third in the
season-long slalom standings,
a discipline that she won last
year.
“I’m a little disappointed
how I was today because I lost
the cup in slalom,” she said,
though adding that the overall
title had been “the main goal
this season.”
Shiffrin is a three-time over-
all champion though chose
to focus on technical events
this season and did not start
in super-G or downhill in the
World Cup.
Oregon’s Sedona Prince spurs NCAA to
upgrade weight rooms at tournament
The NCAA has improved the weight room at its women’s basket-
ball tournament in San Antonio after outcry over the disparity be-
tween the training rooms available to teams in the men’s and wom-
en’s postseason tournaments.
Oregon’s Sedona Prince gave basketball fans a glimpse of the con-
ditions Thursday with a TikTok video that went viral. The video dis-
played stark and eye-opening differences in the amount of training
equipment provided to men’s and women’s teams.
The NCAA later apologized for not providing adequate equipment
for women’s basketball teams.
“We fell short this year in what we’ve been doing to prepare in the
last 60 days for 64 for teams to be here in San Antonio, and we ac-
knowledge that,” Lynn Holzman, the NCAA’s vice president of wom-
en’s basketball, said during a press briefing Friday.
The NCAA followed up with several additions to the weight room,
including more dumbbells, weight racks and mobility bands.
Prince posted a new video Saturday, celebrating the updated train-
ing room with her teammates and thanking the NCAA and her fol-
lowers for making the change happen.
— The Oregonian
South Carolina sopho-
more Aliyah Boston, also an
All-American, will be playing
in her first NCAA Tournament
after last season’s was wiped out
by the pandemic.
First timers
Four teams will be making
their NCAA Tournament de-
buts, although they will all have
a tough task to make it a long
stay. Bradley, High Point. Stony
Brook and Utah Valley. As an
11-seed Bradley has the best
chance to make it out of the
first round as the other three
teams would need to pull off
upsets as 15 and 16 seeds.
Missing their leader
UConn, which has made
the Final Four every tourna-
ment since 2008, will be miss-
ing coach Geno Auriemma for
the first two games because he
contracted the coronavirus last
week. Auriemma should be
back for the Sweet 16.
Marco Trovati/AP
Slovakia’s Petra Vlhova gets to
the finish area after completing a
World Cup slalom in Lenzerheide,
Switzerland, on Saturday.