For the Ohio State women’s basketball players, there is no world where they go into Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Sunday and leave anything but their full effort on the court against Iowa.
“Every game matters, so everybody’s going to give it their all,” said Ohio State guard Rikki Harris. “We’re not going to take any games off. That’s not this program, that’s not our players. Even if they told us we could take it off and certain people didn’t have to play, the players wouldn’t go for that.”
Before No. 2 Ohio State defeated Michigan on Wednesday, the stakes for the upcoming matchup against No. 6 Iowa were of championship proportion. If the Buckeyes would have lost to the Wolverines, the Hawkeyes would have still had a chance to claim a shared Big Ten regular-season title.
With both the title and the No. 1 seed for the conference tournament officially locked in Ohio State’s possession, it has taken away some of the drama going into this game to close out the season, but it doesn’t change the game plan.
“When you start turning on and turning off how hard you’re going to try or play then, that’s where I think that, as a program, you start to run into trouble,” Ohio State coach Kevin McGuff said. “You see it in professional sports all the time, when they tank for draft picks. I don’t know, I just don’t ever see those franchises get where they want to get.”
Though the championship drama is now gone, there is still a lot of excitement surrounding the top-10 matchup. Similar to the record-breaking crowd that came out for their game at Value City Arena back in January, the game on Sunday is expected to be a sellout, with ticket prices some of the highest ever seen in women’s college basketball.
As both programs have been on upward trajectories over the past couple of years, the Ohio State-Iowa rivalry has gained steam. On multiple occasions, Buckeye Cotie McMahon has called matchups against the Hawkeyes “personal.”
“It’s just crazy because I remember freshman year, Iowa was Iowa, of course, but that wasn’t a team that we really felt like we had a rivalry with,” Harris said. “It’s fun, it makes you want to play harder and we love the rivalry. They’re a great team, a great school, they have a great coaching staff, but so do we.”
In the last meeting between the two teams, 45 points from Iowa’s Caitlin Clark wasn’t enough to keep Ohio State from upsetting the then-ranked No. 2 Hawkeyes in overtime. The Buckeyes now have a chance to rain on the Iowa’s season once more.
“I think it’ll be a good matchup,” said Ohio State guard Jacy Sheldon. “We’re excited to go there. It’s a great atmosphere, two really good teams and we’re really excited. We don’t really need any motivation for that game. We’re going to come in ready.”
‘We’re here to win’
Sunday will be Clark’s final regular-season game at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, as she has announced she’s entering the 2024 WNBA Draft. She is also on the verge of breaking another record sitting just 18 points shy of Pete Maravich’s NCAA all-time scoring record.
Following the game, the team will hold senior day celebrations. Knowing they are going into a hostile environment is another layer of the game that the Buckeyes are prepared for.
“They’re doing some different things on offense that we’re going to have to prepare for and they’ve evolved throughout the year, and I think they’ve gotten better,” McGuff said. “We saw a lot of zone against them last time, so our zone offense will also have to be probably at a higher level.”
On the defensive side, after years of coaching his team against Clark, McGuff still acknowledges planning for games where she is on the court as “difficult,” for what she can do with the ball and how she makes the team around her better. A key to the Buckeyes’ victory in January was shutting down the players around Clark.
The Hawkeye lineup is likely going to be able to feed off the crowd on Sunday, so Ohio State is going to need its best defenders to stay in the game. In the last matchup, both Celeste Taylor and Taylor Thierry ran into foul trouble that kept them off the floor for a period of time.
“Want them to play their game, want Celeste to play her game, to be the player that she is and just to be fundamentally sound within our system,” McGuff said. “Fouls are going to happen, but you can’t have those silly ones doing something outside of what we do.”
The Ohio State-Iowa game is going to be on national television, on Fox, setting the stage for many eyes to be on the two teams as they battle for the upper-hand going into postseason play.
“We’re here to win,” Harris said. “We won this championship, but we don’t want any more losses on our record either. I mean, we want to beat Iowa just like they want to beat us and that’s honestly it.”
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: No. 2 Ohio State going all in against Caitlin Clark and No. 6 Iowa
