Top-seeded UMD women’s basketball talks hosting historic 1st NCAA Regional

Winning 27 of 30 games played so far this year the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) women’s basketball team secured their fifth straight NCAA tournament berth, making school history in the process.

Led by the nation’s sixth highest scorer in graduate forward Brooke Olson, averaging over 22 points a game, the Bulldogs earned the one seed in the Central Region and are bringing a regional tournament to Duluth for the first time ever.

“I have been saying this but I knew that Bemidji wasn’t our last game here, I just felt it,” Olson said, a Rice Lake, Wisconsin native. “I just felt in my bones that we had a huge chance of playing here again. I’m just really, really grateful for the opportunity to host and hopefully to win some games here and cut down the nets.”

“It’s really nice from the preparation standpoint,” head coach Mandy Pearson said. “I feel like I get an entire day that we’ve missed the past couple of years because we’ve been traveling. I think our team is really excited, I know Brooke and Maesyn [Thiesen] are ecstatic to be playing another game at Romano because this place means so much to them.”

Top-seeded UMD (27-3) first hosts eighth seeded Southern Nazarene (27-4) in the quarterfinals Friday at 5 p.m. at Romano Gym.

The regional semifinals will be Saturday at 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and the title game is Monday at 7 p.m. For the full schedule, Click Here.