Why 'every game is personal' for Notre Dame women's basketball in 2021-22

Will the Irish get back to their winning ways, or will they continue the trend — one marked by mediocrity and middling performances — established in the last two seasons? Those are the two most pertinent questions, in their most basic forms, head coach Niele Ivey’s team faces entering her second season in charge of the program.

Notre Dame’s leading scorer from last year’s roster answered them rather emphatically at the ACC Tipoff media day event on Wednesday.

“We’re coming for everybody this year,” sophomore Maddy Westbeld said. “Every game is personal.”

There’s a confidence about this Notre Dame team. A 13-18 finish in Muffet McGraw’s final season and a 10-10 record in Ivey’s first have not tempered expectations for the players who don the blue and gold.

Only two players, senior guards Katlyn Gilbert and Abby Prohaska, were on the Notre Dame team that finished as the NCAA runner-up in a national championship game loss to Baylor in 2018-19. Nobody on this year’s roster is around from the national title team of 2017-18.

And yet, the way this group of Irish players talk about the upcoming season would lead many to believe they were all a part of those magical runs.

“This year we have a squad of 10, so we’re small [in roster size] but we’re so big in the heart we have and the closeness that we share,” Westbeld said. “And the chemistry that we have is something really special. We can do awesome things this year in a lot of different ways, and I’m really excited.”

Don’t get Westbeld and her teammates wrong, though. They know they haven’t made it to the big stages they would have liked to the last two seasons. The big game Westbeld is talking in the preseason is a product of a determination for Notre Dame to be a force to be reckoned with in the sport again.

That desire fuels the fire even more.

“That drive, having that sour taste in your mouth from not being where you wanted to be and where you set yourself and your team to be, definitely plays a factor into what we want to do this year,” senior guard Dara Mabrey said.

Appreciating The Game

Ivey issued a head-turning, eyebrow-raising quote at ACC Tipoff.

“Our first day of practice, you’d have thought we had not played basketball in years,” Ivey said.

It’s easy to misconstrue that with negative connotation. It might imply the Irish looked like they had no idea what to do on the floor. But with help from a moderator, Ivey made sense of her statement.

“In a great way,” she clarified. “In a great way — energy-wise. Performance-wise, perfect. Just the appreciation of being on the floor, having that pride of putting a Notre Dame practice jersey on, being together, the chemistry that we created together in the summer, the commitment, the buy-in, the love that they have — I felt like it exuded in everything we did in practice.”

Ivey said it has been that way since the team got back on the court at the end of last month. She said she’s had to force Mabrey and Westbeld to leave on some days.

If the enthusiasm for practice is that palpable, then anticipation of actual game action must be off the charts. And it is.

“What’s firing me up is the fact that we’re going to see 9,000 green glow sticks in the stands on Nov. 9,” Mabrey said. “That’s definitely going to be a unique experience.

“But going off of what Coach Ivey said, the love and the energy is definitely there. It’s present. You can feel it every second of the practice whether we have some ups and some downs. We’ve done a great job of balancing that.”

Winning basketball games takes more than effort and chemistry. It takes talent, coaching and everything coming together. It generally takes a dominance down low that can’t be taught, too.

Do Westbeld (6-3), Stanford transfer Maya Dodson (6-3), junior Sam Brunelle (6-2) and sophomore Natalija Marshall (6-5) combine to form a formidable enough post presence to get Notre Dame back into a position in which it can dictate games from the inside out? That’ll be answered when the Irish play the likes of Syracuse (Nov. 14), Georgia (Nov. 26), Oregon State (Nov. 27), Michigan State (Dec. 2) and UConn (Dec. 5) all within the first month of the season.

This is what has already been answered, though: Notre Dame is all-in on Ivey as its head coach, and the players believe she is the one who can take the program back to the top of the summit in women’s college basketball.

“She brings that fire and passion every day because of that deep appreciation she has for Notre Dame and the university,” Mabrey said. “Playing for her has just been an honor. She gets it. Sometimes it just feels like she’s one of us out there challenging us because she was in our shoes before.

“She gets on you, but every time she does I’m like, ‘She believes in me.’ And that’s all it is. It’s never like, ‘Oh, she’s mad’ or this or that. No. She just has this passion for the game you need to live up to because that’s what you’re supposed to do and that’s the standard of Notre Dame women’s basketball.”

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