Miles punctuates Notre Dame's return to the NCAA Tourney with triple-double
Notre Dame’s relaunch as an NCAA Tournament team came with a more than a little history attached to it on Saturday night.
Olivia Miles became the first freshman in NCAA Tournament history — men's or women's — to record a triple-double, as No. 5 seed Notre Dame advanced out of the tourney’s first round with an 89-78 dismissal of plucky 12 seed UMass.
Mikes also became the third Notre Dame women’s basketball player ever to record two career triple-doubles
Retired Hall of Fame coach Muffet McGraw texted her successor, Irish coach second-year coach Niele Ivey, with some advice before the game — to start aggressively — and Notre Dame (23-8) followed verbatim.
ND built a 17-point, first-quarter lead and Miles continued to feed it one way or another the rest of the way. She ended up with 12 points, 11 rebounds and 11 assists.
Combined with a 14-2 fourth-quarter surge, the Irish moved into the tourney’s second round for the 23rd time in their 27 tourney runs. They’ll meet host and fourth-seeded Oklahoma at Lloyd Noble Center in Norman, Okla., on Monday (6 p.m., ESPN2).
The Sooners (25-8) shook off a persistent challenge from 13 seed IUPUI on their way to a 78-72 victory, Saturday night.
Four Irish players finished in double figures scoring in the first NCAA tourney game for Notre Dame since its 2019 national championship game loss to Baylor under McGraw. Maddy Westbeld led the way with 19 on Saturday night.
Maya Dodson, one of the few active Irish players with NCAA Tourney experience — albeit when she played for Stanford — added 18 points, as did Dara Mabrey, who missed out on an NCAA opportunity in 2020 with Virginia Tech when the tourney was canceled due to COVID-19.
She made five of eight shots from the 3-point arc.
Miles, meanwhile, joins former Notre Dame All-Americans Skylar Diggins-Smith and Jackie Young in the record books as the only two-time members in the seven-player triple-double club.
“You know, those are the all-time greats of Notre Dame,” Miles said. “Both amazing players. So it just feels like surreal that my name can be in that company.”
And Ivey hinted the best is yet to come.
“I don't think she has a ceiling,” she said. “She's so special. I knew she was special from the first time I saw her, and also when she decided to come to Notre Dame. I knew that she's different. Her flair, her style of game.
“She has great vision like Skylar, but she plays different, just with her flair, her swag. But I mean it's just incredible that she can come into her first tournament game and get a triple-double. I think she still has so many areas to continue to grow. I'm just really proud she came in, she was mentally focused. She was ready.”
So too was senior guard Abby Prohaska, something Ivey couldn’t say since Feb. 1. In her first game since suffering an eye-socket injury that required surgery, Prohaska scored six quick points in an early 13-2 Irish run and played tough defense with three steals in 12 minutes off the bench.
“She's my toughness,” Ivey said. “She gives us that toughness and that energy that we need.”
Long term, she could make Notre Dame a deeper and more dangerous team or, at the very least, a tougher out.
“Abby's one of a kind,” Mabrey said. “She's just one of those players that is willing to sacrifice anything for the betterment of the team. And she presented that right away today. Her presence is felt immediately on our team and the other team.
“It felt great to have her back, you know, for numerous reasons. She just brings a spark to our team. She does a lot of little things that are hard to find sometimes. And she has confidence, you know. You feel her presence, and then everybody feeds off of it.
“She's been with this group a long time. She knows what it takes. She's been to the tournament. She made her run freshman year with that group. So I'm really happy to have Abby back.”
A10 Player of the Year Sam Breen and guard Syndney Taylor kept UMass (26-7) within striking distance at times, though the Minutewomen never got closer than six after the Prohaska-led burst in the first quarter.
Breen tied her career high with 31 points, including a half-court heave at the halftime buzzer. Taylor added 21 with four 3-pointers.
“We have film now that we can show different areas that we need to get better,” Ivey said. “Our turnovers. Our defense. Having awareness of their shooters. There's so many areas that we can fix.
“We do have 24 hours to do that, at least see it. Having a game that had a lot of runs, I think that's great, because it shows this team also that it doesn't matter how many points you're up. Like at any moment a team can come back, and that's the environment of the NCAA tournament.
“You're trying to survive. So it was great for us to have so many situations and scenarios that we'll grow from, because we are a very young group.”
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