UTSA women’s basketball led East Carolina for most of the game in Tuesday night’s conference semifinal in Fort Worth. The Pirates overcame the Roadrunners with a 14-4 run in the final half of the fourth quarter to slip past for a 55-54 win.
The Roadrunners, moments away from possibly being in the conference tournament championship game, had to come to terms with their run ending suddenly in the conference semifinals.
Such is life in March. One day you are on top of the world, beating South Florida in the quarterfinals and the next day your run is done. The other team celebrates moving on.
The Roadrunners run might not be over. The only hope for the NCAA tournament was to win the conference tournament but there is still a chance they could play in one of the other postseason tournaments. They won’t find that out until Sunday when the tournaments make their selections.
If there isn’t another game for the UTSA women’s basketball team this year and the book on 2023-24 has been closed, it will go down as a year of growth for the program.
In the third year with Karen Aston at the helm the Roadrunners picked up their first winning season since 2014-15. The 17 wins this year are the most by a Roadrunner women’s basketball team since the 2008-09 team won 24 games.
That 2009 team remains the last Roadrunner team to make the NCAA tournament and the last Roadrunner team to make a conference tournament final. This year’s team came one game short of returning to that height.
A year ago, in the final year in Conference USA, UTSA made a surprise run to the conference semifinals. This year the Roadrunners finished fourth in their first year in the American. The team looks to be on an upward trajectory.
Last year the Roadrunners knocked on the door. This year the Roadrunners went to a different door and banged on it. Next year the Roadrunners will hope to return to that door and kick it in, returning to, and possibly winning, a conference tournament final.
