Notre Dame Women Fight Off Foul Trouble To Hold Off Cal In Citi Shamrock Classic

Notre Dame women's basketball coach made her return to her home town and her Irish overcame foul trouble to beat Cal 90-79 in the Citi Shamrock Classic in St. Louis

St. Louis, Mo. – Fifty-nine. Fifty-nine of anything is a lot of anything. A 200-pound person who loses 59 pounds has dropped almost a third of their body weight. Fifty-nine minutes is just short of an hour.

Saturday’s Citi Shamrock Classic women’s basketball game between Notre Dame and California featured 59 personal fouls. Of them, 28 were assessed to the winners, Notre Dame, and 31 to the losers, Cal, in a less than aesthetic game that completed an otherwise feel-good weekend for Irish head coach Niele Ivey in her return to her home town.

Oh yeah, Ivey’s Irish (2-0) did win 90-79 in the Enterprise Center in downtown St. Louis. The win came 7,895 days since Ivey last stepped foot in the building when she helped Notre Dame win its first national championship to cap her career and the 2001 season.

“Oh my gosh,” Ivey said of stepping foot back into the building where she helped Muffet McGraw make program history. “I just went straight to the locker room. I feel like this is the same locker room. I think we’re having the same bench. I ran on the court like I did afterwards just to get the vibes, but it was fun. It was fun going in the tunnel. I remember all of this. Super surreal to be back here again.”

Dealing With Fouls

Five different Irish players picked up at least four fouls in the game. Dara Mabrey led the Irish with 16 points, despite fouling out with :51 seconds to play. 

Maddy Westbeld finished with 12 points and four fouls. She sat for the first four and a half minutes of the fourth quarter after picking up her fourth with 2:27 remaining in the third quarter.

“It was frustrating,” Westbeld said after the game. “I think we came out hot. We came out ready to go and obviously fouls kind of take you out of your momentum. But trying to keep that energy on the bench and just cheering for my team and then coming back in and trying to maintain that energy on defense or getting (offensive) boards or whatever it was. But I think it definitely took us out of our game a little bit, so we had to adjust in a lot of different ways. But we pulled it through, somehow.”

Olivia Miles also picked up her fourth foul in the third quarter and came back in the game with Westbeld in the fourth. She had 13 points and 10 rebounds, for her second double double in as many games this season and the 11th of her career.

“Liv’s being Live,” Irish assistant Charel Allen said of Miles. “I mean, we know that, the nation knows that. She shares the ball. She will find her teammates. So I just feel like that’s just Liv being Liv and she’s very unselfish. At times, we just wish she would look to score a little bit more, but Liv’s just playing her game and she really lets it come to her.”

Lauren Ebo fouled out with 2:05 to play after scoring eight points. With the Westbeld, Mile and Ebo trio sitting for nearly eight minutes with four fouls each, a rotation that included Sonia Citron (14 pts), Kylee Watson (15), Nat Marshall (9), and KK Bransford (3) stepped up to keep the Irish afloat when what was a 14-point lead shrunk to three points.

“Nat was huge today,” Allen said. “She was huge today. She hit a bunch of tough shots for us and kept that momentum going. Dara was huge, just being that voice on the offensive end and being that floor general that she is. And Sonia, too. Everybody played really tough today and stepped up when they needed to.

“I thought our bench stepped up huge,” Allen continued. “Huge. We didn’t anticipate our starters getting in foul trouble. Our bench was huge. Nat Marshall, KK Bransford, they were huge off the bench. They gave us the spark that we needed.”

Overcoming The Adversity

Despite the onslaught of fouls, Notre Dame’s players never flinched and the game never really felt in doubt. It’s a far cry from Ivey’s first season when the less adversity routinely saw fourth quarter leads turn into frustrating losses.

“I feel like we faced adversity early and this is really good,” Allen said. “To just show that this is really only our second game in and we can win games down the stretch. Whether it’s the bad calls maybe….and we can’t control that. We can only control what we can control, and I felt like the girls stepped up and handled adversity really well.

“Handling adversity in game two, yeah this is going to pay off,” she continued. “And we’re going to remember this and we’re going to learn from it. We weren’t perfect by any means, but we did what we had to do and we won.”

“We just know that as coaches, they just gained a little bit more trust that we can put them in early or whatever the case may be, but I thought the girls did great today.”

Missouri Magic

Ivey is a St. Louis native and the weekend was a homecoming for her as well as a chance to show her team her roots, which included the trip down memory lane at her high school alma mater, Cor Jesu

“Just to be able to show the team St. Louis and going back to my high school,” Ivey said. “They gave us a warm welcome. It was such an incredible homecoming. The energy was electric.”

Ivey and her team spent Friday in St. Louis, where they visited the school and spoke to a school assembly.

“It was very overwhelming. Yesterday, we spent a lot of the day just going to Coach’s (Ivey's) school, going to places around the community talking to a lot of very important people and people who are paving the way for so many women and black women. Just seeing new barriers broken is something very special. And to be a part of something like that, it was very overwhelming. I’m just grateful to be a part of Coach’s era. I don’t know….it was hard to grasp how I was feeling, because it was very…it was awesome.”

Cor Jesu high school’s primary color is red and fans from the school came to the game in droves, dressed in red t-shirts with a big green shamrock on the front and “Ivey” and the number 33 (her number when she played at Notre Dame) on the back.

“They came with crazy energy yesterday, coming to their school and just accepting us the way they did,” Westbeld said. “They had little gift bags and everything for us and just excited to see us and to see Coach. It was just awesome to see them support her in such a way and be inspired by the person that she is. And even to come back to a school and the way that they were talking about her, that she’s been the person that we know she is for her whole life. It was very inspiring, very awesome and reassuring to know the type of coach that I play for.”

Allen, a Notre Dame 2008 graduate who is on her first year on Ivey’s staff, appreciated the uniqueness of the weekend as well.

“This was fun,” Allen said. “I hope we do it more often. I know we are doing it in the future with the Shamrock Classic. Just to bring Coach back to St. Louis and just watch her high school outpour. Like just her community outpour to her, and (Cal head coach) Charmin (Smith) as well, it’s great. It’s great for women’s basketball, it’s great for those two head coaches and I love to see it.” 

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