Update: UTSA guard Siena Guttadauro announced through an athletics spokesman on Friday that she will be stepping away from basketball for the remainder of the 2024-25 season for personal reasons. Guttadauro is planning to return for the 2025-26 season, according to the statement.
By Jerry Briggs
Special for The JB Replay
In the wake of a six-game winning streak, the UTSA women’s basketball team landed at No. 57 nationally in the NCAA’s NET rankings earlier this week. The Roadrunners were 64th on Thursday when they took the floor for an afternoon workout at the Convocation Center.
Without data to know for sure, it’s likely the highest ranking for the UTSA women since the NET came into play in women’s basketball in 2020-21, when officials started to use it to help evaluate teams for selection and seeding in the NCAA tournament.
Regardless, UTSA is at least momentarily the highest NET-ranked team in The American Athletic Conference as it prepares to play a non-conference home game on Saturday against Sam Houston State.
Without placing too much emphasis on their top-64 stature in the first week of the metric’s publication, Roadrunners coach Karen Aston said it’s good to know her players and her program have been noticed.
“Anytime you’re in a better position than you’ve been in the past, it’s a good feeling,” she said. “Obviously you don’t put a lot of weight into it right now. But, I’m proud of where we are. No question, we have not been in that spot since I’ve been here, for sure.
“So, I’m proud of ’em and would like to see ’em get better.”
After UTSA, Tulane came in at No. 90, with South Florida at 99 and Temple 100 as the highest-ranked teams in the American, according to the rankings as they were published on Thursday morning.
“Yeah, it’s good to know that we’re in that position, but we also understand we got a long way to go,” Aston said. “You know, things happen, and you got to keep getting better. There’s a lot for us to (improve on) but we understand that.”
Part of the challenge this week centered on the team’s travel schedule. After traveling to Puerto Rico and beating North Carolina Greensboro and Towson last week, the Roadrunners returned home Sunday and faced a daunting challenge with their academic regimen.
Preparing for final exams scheduled next week is only part of the challenge for the Roadrunners.
“A lot of players, a lot of students in general, don’t really have a lot of finals anymore,” Aston said. “A lot of times, it’s really the week prior to finals that is really hard, because they have to turn in a lot of stuff, a lot of papers.
“Sometimes their last exam is this week instead of finals week. I’ve discovered that this is actually a harder week than finals week.”
Consequently, the players’ attention to detail at practice this week has been “up and down,” the coach acknowledged.
“Coming off the long road trip and having the week off, you’re anxious and maybe a little leery of them letting their guard down and losing an edge that they had before,” the coach said. “But, I mean, it is what it is. They’ll learn some lessons if they don’t have one on Saturday.”
Soon after Sam Houston State (5-2) beat McMurry 74-53 on Thursday, Aston gathered her Roadrunners (6-1) before practice started and told them about the Bearkats’ guard tandem of Kaila Kelley and Fanta Kone. Kelley scored 21 points in the win and Kone had 14 rebounds and 10 assists.
As a team, the Bearkats forced 30 turnovers against the War Hawks.
“They’re relentless,” Aston said. “They really pressure the ball. They play hard. They’re scrappy and real intentional at ball pressure. The live off of transition and turnovers, so it’ll be a challenge.”
Notable
After almost a year of analysis, the Division I Women’s Basketball Committee decided the time was right for full implementation of NET for 2020-21, with ratings percentage index (RPI) no longer being used.
RPI was created in 1981 to provide supplemental data for the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee in its evaluation of teams for at-large selection and seeding of the championship bracket. The Division I Women’s Basketball Committee began using RPI in 1984.