March 30, 2025
Locked On Women’s Basketball: 2025 March Madness breakout stars
By The Next
Drafting the tournament's top players, and analyzing Sweet 16 results
After a jam-packed day of 2025 March Madness action, co-hosts Hunter Cruse and Lincoln Shafer join forces for a late night episode of Locked On Women’s Basketball. They analyze Sweet 16 results, and walk through the tournament’s breakout stars.
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Cruse and Shafer started with a quick draft of the best and most impactful players from this year’s NCAA Tournament. After Cruse selected Alabama’s Sarah Ashlee Barker, who scored a program-high 45 points in Alabama’s double overtime loss to Maryland, Shafer explained his first pick:
“My pick is … not based off of just volume of scoring, but stepping up in the moment,” Shafer said. “And I’m not gonna take the person who scored the second most points in a game in this tournament. I’m gonna take [USC freshman guard] Avery Howell, who just put up a really, really solid performance in her first start of the tournament against Kansas State in the Sweet 16 after JuJu Watkins goes out with injury. In the round of 32 she really stepped up. She scored 18 points in both of the last two tournament games for Southern Cal to put them into the Elite Eight, played a huge role in getting them in today with timely buckets, big threes and just an all around stat-stuffing performance. [She also had] eight rebounds, had an assist, just is doing her job on the floor and stepping up for a team that needs help where they can get it right now.”
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Then, they talked about Notre Dame’s 72-61 loss to TCU:
“TCU [is] now 2-0 this season against Notre Dame, they beat them in the Thanksgiving tournament as well,” Shafer said. “It’s hard for Notre Dame to win when their best players are not making shots, because so much of their offense is so reliant on the self-creation abilities of Hannah Hidalgo, Olivia Miles and Sonia Citron. So when those three players combine to shoot … 10 of 44, I believe, that’s not what you’re looking for. 10 for 44 between your three shot-creating guards, it’s just hard for you to win. Notre Dame has struggled all season with their offense kind of bogging down into this ‘my turn, your turn,’ iso-situations, and that’s 100% what I think happened in their first game against TCU. And then they really were struggling to deal with TCU’s size across the board. Because Notre Dame doesn’t exactly have elite positional size anywhere, but to have to have a 6’7 center that is capable of throwing a lot of those passes when you’re sending doubles and sending back side help, and you can’t really do much with that. So for Notre Dame, it’s, it’s a disappointment. It’s a disappointing end of the season for them, because this is when you have national title aspirations.”
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Tune in to hear more about the Sweet 16 games, including Paige Buecker’s 40-point performance, Texas’ triumph over Tennessee, and more. Make sure to subscribe to the Locked On Women’s Basketball podcast to keep learning about the WNBA, women’s college basketball, basketball history and much more!
