Women’s basketball: Dayton shows resiliency, consistency on way to A-10 title

The Dayton Flyers celebrated after clinching the Atlantic 10 Conference regular-season championship with a 72-66 victory at Davidson. It’s their sixth championship, and they’ve all been won in the last nine years and in back-to-back seasons (2013 and 2014; 2017 and 2018; and 2020 and 2021).

In her four seasons as coach, Green has won three regular-season championships. Dayton finished 15-1 in 2018, her first season, 15-1 last season and 12-1 this season. Green also hit a milestone with her 100th victory at Dayton. She’s 100-42.

While the A-10 tournament looms next week, Green knows how big of an accomplishment the regular-season championship is.

“It shows the consistency you have to have,” Green said, “and then you throw in a season like this with so many interruptions and challenges with COVID, I’m just so proud of our team. With the leadership from within and the resiliency, they kind of just stayed the course.”

Dayton (13-2, 12-1) also clinched the No. 1 seed in the A-10 tournament. It will play No. 8 seed La Salle (11-13, 7-10) or No. 9 Duquesne (5-10, 4-7) in the quarterfinals at 11 a.m. on March 12. Dayton beat Duquesne 64-48 on Jan. 3 at UD Arena and beat La Salle 95-66 on Feb. 7 in Philadelphia.

The tournament starts March 10, a week later than originally planned, with two games involving the bottom four seeds. All the games will take place at Virginia Commonwealth’s Siegel Center in Richmond, Va.

Dayton, No. 2 seed Fordham, No. 3 Saint Louis and No. 4 Rhode Island received double byes into the quarterfinals. If Dayton wins Friday, it will play in the semifinals at 1 p.m. on March 13. The championship game takes place at noon on March 14.

The first three rounds of the tournament will be televised on ESPN+. The semifinals will be on the CBS Sports Network. ESPNU will broadcast the championship game.

The A-10 champion earns the league’s automatic NCAA tournament bid. The bracket will be announced at 7 p.m., March 15. The tournament starts March 21. All games will take place in San Antonio, Texas.

In the latest bracket projection by ESPN, Dayton was predicted to get a No. 13 seed and play No. 4 seed West Virginia in the first round. Green doesn’t think her team has a chance to get an at-large berth.

“We didn’t have a non-conference (schedule, except for two games), and that really hurt us,” Green said, “because we had a really good schedule where we had opportunities to get a signature win to build our resume.”

Green will give the team two off days after the Davidson win before getting back to work and preparing for the postseason. They’ll leave for Richmond on March 10.

“We’re just going to work on us, and we’re going to try to get better at some things we need to get better at right now,” she said. “We’ll probably do a intrasquad scrimmage and try to treat it like a game on Saturday.”