MORGANTOWN — Nikki Izzo-Brown admits she casually listened to the buzz that surrounded West Virginia’s championship in the Big 12 tournament last week.
“The people on TV, all they kept saying was West Virginia hadn’t been to the Big 12 championship since 2016,” Izzo-Brown said. “I’m like, ‘Wait, wasn’t that just two years ago?’ ”
It is a standard of excellence built through five previous Big 12 championships, along with a trip to the national championship game in 2016 and three Elite Eight appearances in past NCAA tournaments.
All of that sort of dulled Monday’s announcement that the 14th-ranked Mountaineers (14-4-3) had earned a national No. 2 seed and will host Big South champion Radford (16-2-1) — owners of an 11-match win streak — at Dick Dlesk Stadium, at 4 p.m. Saturday, in the first round of the NCAA tournament.
A win in the first round will set up a second-round match against either Wake Forest or Ohio State, on Nov. 16, also at Dick Dlesk Stadium.
The Mountaineers were expected to be at this point. Getting here was the interesting journey.
“There is a high expectation here, which is a privilege, the hard part is living up to it,” Izzo-Brown said.
And so, when a 1-0 loss against Penn State in the season opener was followed by ties with Arkansas, Purdue and Northwestern, it suddenly became a different kind of season for West Virginia.
“When we were getting ties, everybody suddenly became concerned,” Izzo-Brown said.
Everybody, maybe, except for the coaches and players.
To this day, Izzo-Brown refuses to call it a “rocky start” to this season and doesn’t believe last week’s run to the Big 12 title was some sort of saving grace for the Mountaineers.
“Everybody expected us to just roll and win and we weren’t doing that in the beginning,” she said. “What we decided to do was grind. What we decided to do was work hard. What we decided to do was know our job and know our roles better and stay more focused than any team in the country.”
It took adjustments. It took leaning heavily on defense while trying to put together some offense.
“We had to find the right combinations,” Izzo-Brown said. “We had to put people in different areas for them to succeed. Our players had to do a little bit more than they had to before.
“When you have Ashley Lawrence and Kadeisha Buchanan, it’s like having Will Grier. You just put the ball in his hands and let him do his thing, but we don’t have Ashley and Kadeisha anymore. What we had to do was everybody had to pick up some of those pieces and do more of a job in putting those pieces together.”
West Virginia has pitched four shutouts in winning seven of its last eight matches and will look to add to its three-match winning streak in NCAA first-round games.
And likely meet some expectations along the way.
“If you watched what this team did against the highest-ranked RPI league in the country, we gutted it out and we had the winning mindset,” Izzo-Brown said. “But, we’re not done. We’re not done.”
Twitter @bigjax3211
