For 2-and-half quarters, Green Bay’s 76-63 win in the 2025 Barbasol Horizon League Women’s Basketball Championship over Fort Wayne was a ferocious and memorable battle.
There were 13 ties in the game and 10 lead changes. Purdue Fort Wayne’s point guard, Sydney Freeman–who did not play basketball in 2023-2024 after playing 4 seasons at Ball State and Dayton–was out there hitting NBA-range 3’s like she was Caitlin Clark.
But then the scoring dried up for the Mastodons, and it did not dry up for the Phoenix.
After Purdue Fort Wayne’s Lauren Ross made a lay-up with 1:20 left in the 3rd quarter, Green Bay led, 55-53. The next time the Mastodons scored, it was nearly 3 minutes into the fourth quarter, and they trailed by double digits.
“At half time, we found ourselves even, but they had hit 7 3s,” Green Bay head coach Kayla Karius said, “so we weren’t really satisfied with our our defensive execution. We knew what we had to do is just a matter of taking it away, so I thought the second half we came out in that third quarter and tightened up a little bit better and then got rolling.”
This will be Karius’s first NCAA Tournament appearance as a head coach, after taking over for her alma mater in the offseason. While she has played professional basketball abroad, coached as an assistant in the Big Ten, and taken her previous program, South Dakota, into the postseason, she described this particular moment as “at the top” of her achievements and memories in and around the game of basketball.
“She’s one of the people that has built the history up to what it is,” senior guard Natalie McNeal said after scoring 26 points in the game to go along with 8 rebounds and her 2nd straight tournament MVP award. “So as much as she’s technically a new face, she knows exactly what this program’s about and what the type of players that play in this program are about. And I think that really made the transition very smooth because she knows we want to work together with her.”
Kariusso returned the appreciation: “There was just a look in her eye like she couldn’t be stopped, and it looked exactly like she did last year at this exact moment in the title game…One of the things that nobody’s talking about, but they should, is the fact that Natalie McNeal guarded one of the toughest players in our league (in) Lauren Ross, top three-point shooter in the entire country, and held her to 5 points.”
Ross was only able to find the space to shoot 4 3s in the game, 1 of which went in, and Purdue Fort Wayne head coach Maria Marchesano offered her own explanation as to how Green Bay’s defense made things so complicated for the Mastodons: “They do a lot of things. For one, they contain the ball extremely well. We’re a team that gets downhill pretty easily on most teams and against Green Bay we don’t. We don’t get in the paint too much, right? Another thing they do is they take away our post-entry angles, you know, we have two dominant hosts that can score pretty much at will down there, and we struggle to even get it to them…the other thing that they do is they mix it up, you know? Sometimes they’re going to switch hard. Sometimes they’re going to hedge hate. Sometimes they’re not going to switch at all, and they’re going to stay with their matchups. And as a coach and as a player, you know you’re trying to get a feel for the game, and then all of a sudden they do something different…They’ve been together so long, and they play so hard, and they’re strong kids. Those are big, strong kids. So, it’s just a perfect storm with their defense.”
Green Bay will now have the opportunity to return to the NCAA Tournament. Last year’s team lost to Tennessee, and after the 1st quarter, the game wasn’t close. This year’s group has been there before, though, and with their depth, experience, and strength across multiple facets of the game, they won’t be a team one of the higher seeds will want to draw.
“A big part of us this whole year is that we’ve been on a mission to get back there,” McNeal said, “so I think, you know just staying hungry, knowing that we’re not done yet. We’ve been in this position before, which is really exciting, and we’re really lucky to have been.”
