Panthers denied NCAA berth

There wasn’t much respect for either Pitt Panther basketball team in the NCAA Tournaments this… There wasn’t much respect for either Pitt Panther basketball team in the NCAA Tournaments this year.

Unlike the men, however, who earned a scrutinized No. 5 seed in the upcoming NCAA Tournament, the NCAA Selection Committee didn’t feel the Panther women deserved a seed in the Women’s NCAA Tournament at all.

“We just really felt in our heart and souls that we would make history tonight,” Coach Agnus Berenato said of her team trying to capture its first NCAA berth. “We thought that we did enough, and we worked hard enough and that we proved that we belonged in the NCAA [Tournament].

“We felt we were in.”

The Panthers finished the regular season with a 19-10 overall record, and a 9-7 Big East record to place them sixth in the conference, the team’s best conference finish in 11 years.

“I think everybody here is disappointed,” junior guard Mallorie Winn said. “We’re just left wondering why certain teams got in and why we didn’t.”

The Big East sent a total of seven teams to the tournament, including nine-seeds Notre Dame (18-11, 8-9) and South Florida (19-11, 9-7), both of which finished lower than Pitt in the conference.

The Panthers also beat South Florida – twice.

“When I did my brackets I had South Florida in, but I had them in after us,” Berenato said. “We beat them two times, home and away.”

“Obviously we compared ourselves with the other teams in the Big East,” Winn said. “We beat South Florida twice head-to-head, so we’re a little confused as to how they got in over us, but congratulations to them.”

“Do I understand it? No. Am I happy with it? Absolutely not, but there’s nothing we can do about it,” Berenato added.

“I’m sure that there’s a lot of data that we’re not privy to,” Berenato said.

Perhaps one thing that hurt the Panthers’ NCAA Tournament resume was their 0-4 record against top-25 teams, including a 23-point loss to No. 15 DePaul in the Big East Tournament’s quarterfinals less than two weeks ago. Another crushing loss came in the regular season finale when the Panthers squandered a double-digit lead and ultimately lost to Notre Dame.

And as of March 5, Pitt had an RPI rating of 64 with the 74th toughest schedule in the country, according to ESPN.com. The seven Big East squads that received tournament bids all had an RPI higher than 50.

“You can always say you can do better,” Winn said. “But I think we placed ourselves in a great position, and I think we deserved to get in.”

The bittersweet news for the Panthers is that their postseason isn’t over. Pitt will play in the Women’s National Invitation Tournament. Berenato’s team will host a game on Saturday at 2 p.m. in the Petersen Events Center.

“Unfortunately we didn’t make history, but we’ll repeat history with the WNIT,” Berenato said. “From here on, the team will regroup, we’ll adjust-and we’ll win the WNIT. A national championship is a national championship,” the third-year coach said.

Pitt last reached the WNIT in 2000 and exited with a first-round loss to Cincinnati. Pitt hasn’t seen post-Big East Tournament action since then.

But the sun hasn’t set on the Panthers. Although disappointed, the team will use that emotion to build upon in the future.

“Everybody is upset right now that we didn’t get in [to the NCAA Tournament],” Winn said. “I think that’s going to make us work harder, kind of have a chip on our shoulder, and now we’re looking to win a WNIT championship.”

Perhaps Berenato summed up the night better than anybody else.

“The sun will come up in the morning,” she said. “We’ll all get out of bed-and we’ll go to work on the basketball court. There’s a lot of teams in the country that don’t have that option.

“We still have that.”