After missing out on the NCAA Tournament, Penn State earned a bid to the inaugural Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament on Sunday. The Lady Lions were named a No. 1 seed and will face unseeded George Mason at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Bryce Jordan Center in the first round.
Penn State is one of four No. 1 seeds in the 2024 WBIT‘s 32-team field, along with Miami, Villanova and Washington State.
The Lady Lions were considered a bubble team for March Madness after a six-game losing streak in February. With 19 wins, Penn State lost in the third round of the Big Ten Tournament to Iowa in a disappointing 95-62 performance. The loss moved Penn State from one of the last teams in the NCAA Tournament to one of the first teams out in many bracket predictions.
The 2023-24 season marked Penn State’s first with more than 14 wins and first with a postseason tournament berth in head coach Carolyn Kieger’s five seasons at the helm.
Penn State has not played in a postseason tournament since the WNIT in 2018, when a Coquese Washington-led unit fell to Radford in an overtime battle at the Jordan Center. After struggling the following season, Washington was replaced by Kieger.
Now the Lady Lions are back in the postseason for the WBIT, which the NCAA created to provide “equitable postseason opportunities for women’s basketball similar to that of men’s basketball,” according to the association. The NCAA Championships and the NIT and WBIT give Division I men’s and women’s basketball 100 teams each in NCAA-operated postseason tournaments.
The WNIT, which unlike the men’s NIT is not owned by the NCAA, continues as a 48-team tournament and is now third in the women’s basketball postseason pecking order.
Following Thursday’s opening round, the inaugural WBIT will continue with second round games on Sunday, March 24, followed by quarterfinals on Thursday, March 28. The first three rounds will be streamed on ESPN+.
Semifinal games, which will air on ESPNU, are scheduled for Monday, April 1 at Butler University’s Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. The championship game is set for Wednesday, April 3, at Hinkle and airing on ESPN2.
StateCollege.com’s Geoff Rushton contributed to this report
