K-State women continue upward trend with NCAA berth

Another year under the tutelage of coach Jeff Mittie. Another tournament berth for the Kansas State women’s basketball team.

For three years now, Mittie has led the Wildcats to postseason play, which in itself isn’t an anomaly – Deb Patterson’s teams only missed playing in March five of the 18 seasons she coached from 1996 to 2014 before Mittie arrived in Manhattan.

But when Patterson was fired at the end of the 2013-14 season, the Wildcats had gone from a 9-9 conference record in 2011-12 to finishing 5-13 against Big 12 opponents for two straight years.

Mittie was brought in to reverse K-State’s downward trend. The Wildcats had an 85-80 record the last five seasons under Patterson after enjoying a 114-51 stretch the previous five years. And in Mittie’s third year, K-State is getting a lot closer to looking like those teams in the early 2000s that perennially made a tournament run.

The seventh-seed Wildcats (22-10) will play 10th-seed Drake at 3 p.m. Saturday in Bramlage Coliseum.

“They’ve really committed themselves to playing at a high standard and doing that consistently,” Mittie said Friday. “And if you do those things and your culture cultivates those things then … you can do some special things down the road.”

The Wildcats don’t have an easy road ahead of them. Drake (28-4) is riding a 22-game winning streak – the second-longest active streak in the NCAA behind Connecticut’s 106 – and is seventh in the country in points per game (83). The Missouri Valley Conference-champion Bulldogs have five players averaging double figures in scoring, including Lizzy Wendell (21.1) and Kapaun Mount Carmel grad Sammie Bachrodt (10.3).

Their up-tempo offense will challenge K-State, which averages 68 points and typically allows 62 points. But with senior Kindred Wesemann leading K-State and the Big 12 with 85 three-pointers, the Wildcats at least have an outside shot at claiming a second-round berth.

“They are really long, they get their hands up a lot on defense like we do. They like to push in transition,” Wesemann said. “I think our transition defense has to be better than it has been.”

Wesemann, who also leads the team with 14 points and 61 steals, will have to find a way around a Drake defense that holds opponents to a .307 mark from three-point range. She was able to do that against UConn in November, when she hit a trio of triples and was .500 beyond the arc against a team that this season has limited opponents to a .269 three-point percentage.

K-State will also need a good performance from fellow All-Big 12 pick Breanna Lewis. The senior center ranks seventh in the Big 12 with 278 career blocks and has averaged 2.2 through four seasons. She’s just as valuable offensively, putting up 13.7 points and shooting 55.7 percent.

“He obviously saw something in us that he saw he could get this program back to where it needs to be,” Wesemann said of Mittie. “We were going to be sophomores and we had to grab it by the horns and go with it. We had to trust whatever he said and we did and I think it’s paid off.”

This story was originally published March 17, 2017 at 7:14 PM with the headline "K-State women continue upward trend with NCAA berth."