Vanderbilt women's basketball spent the past decade at the bottom of the SEC. After a free fall down the conference standings throughout the 2010s, the school’s storied women’s program notched last-place finishes in 2019 and 2021, around when then-new athletic director Candace Storey Lee made a call to UConn’s star assistant coach Shea Ralph.
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Ralph, now in her fifth season, has brought the Commodores to the top. Well, near the top — Vanderbilt will enter this week’s end-of-season SEC tournament as the two-seed behind perennial powerhouse South Carolina. After finishing the regular season undefeated in Memorial Gymnasium, Vanderbilt got some off-court momentum early Tuesday morning.
The three top SEC honors — Coach of the Year, Player of the Year and Freshman of the Year — now belong to Ralph, sophomore superstar Mikayla Blakes and rookie guard Aubrey Galvan after a spectacular season that has made the ’Dores a national contender. Conference head coaches, who struggled to game plan for Blakes and Galvan all season, voted on the awards. Blakes, a first-team selection as well as coaches’ unanimous pick for Player of the Year, was the only pick on the SEC first or second team from Vanderbilt. Blakes’ 27.1 average points per game lead all scorers in D1 college basketball — men’s and women’s.
Ralph crowned her players a few weeks ago after a marquee win over the No. 4 Texas Longhorns. Blakes and Galvan combined for 54 points that night and shot 50 percent from the three-point line.
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“ Prove me wrong that that's not the SEC Player of the Year and the national player of the year, and this one is not the Freshman of the Year,” Ralph told reporters in February, gesturing at the empty chairs where Blakes and Galvan had fielded questions a few minutes earlier. “Every single night they show up and they do exactly what our team needs to do for them to win regardless of the narrative, regardless of the opponent, regardless of all the things that they can't control.”
Two upperclassmen — Sacha Washington, an agile forward now in her fifth season at Vanderbilt, and three-point specialist and senior Justine Pissott — were left off the awards list, despite being key pieces in Vanderbilt’s rise to a top-five national ranking this season. Pissott finished the regular season with the second-highest three-point shooting percentage (43.1 percent) and the highest average threes per game (2.9) in the SEC.
Strong wins over No. 17 Kentucky as well as Alabama and Tennessee cinched a bye to the quarterfinals for Vanderbilt, which will face either Auburn, Texas A&M or No. 20 Ole Miss on Friday. Early projections for the NCAA tournament put Vanderbilt as a two-seed, giving the ’Dores home-court advantage for the tournament’s first and second rounds.
