Notre Dame women's basketball wins ACC Tournament for first time since 2019
Who else to turn to in a tie game with a championship on the line than the ACC Rookie of the Year? The Notre Dame player who turned heads and bolstered her highlight reel all year with every stuffed stat sheet leading up to the final two and a half minutes of the ACC Tournament title game at the Greensboro Coliseum on Sunday afternoon?
Add a couple clips to the reel. Add a banner to the rafters at Purcell Pavilion. Hannah Hidalgo won Notre Dame its first ACC Tournament championship since 2019.
She scored five of the Irish’s final six points in a 55-51 victory over NC State. A pair of tough buckets in the paint on back-to-back possessions gave No. 14 Notre Dame (26-6) two separate two-point leads with 2:24 left and then again with 1:28 remaining. Her free throw with 10.5 seconds on the clock made it a two-possession game.
Hidalgo’s heroics were calculated.
“We noticed the ball screen was working, so we kind of cleared out and spaced out and just put [NC State center River] Baldwin in a ball screen, and if they collapsed, the kick out for the shooter was open, and if not, then it was a one-on-one for the drive,” Hidalgo said. “It worked, and so I made a move on her and was able to get all the way to the basket.”
The No. 10 Wolfpack (27-6) couldn’t keep up with Hidalgo in crunch time. A game-high 22 points plus 6 rebounds, 6 assists and 2 steals were all too much from the 2024 ACC Tournament’s Most Valuable Player. Hidalgo averaged 19.3 points, 6 rebounds, 6 assists and 2 steals in Notre Dame’s three-game run to hoisting hardware. All three games were against AP Top 25 foes.
“She plays with no fear,” Notre Dame head coach Niele Ivey said in her postgame interview with ESPN. “She’s relentless. Fearless. Competitive. Passionate. Everything that you would want in a person and a point guard, for sure. I just love her.”
As has routinely been the case during Notre Dame’s eight-game winning streak, one they will put on the line in the NCAA Tournament in a week and a half, it wasn’t just Hidalgo getting the job done. She sealed the deal, but junior guard Sonia Citron and senior forward Maddy Westbeld helped her get there.
When Notre Dame trailed 5-0 out of the gates and was in danger of slipping back into a bad habit of trailing by double digits in the first quarter, a trend that endured six of seven games in February, Citron went on a personal 5-0 run to knot things up and set the tone for what would be a tightly contested matchup all afternoon. Citron had 11 points on 4-of-11 shooting. She also had a team-high 8 rebounds.
Westbeld scored Notre Dame’s first eight points of the fourth quarter, meanwhile. NC State ratcheted up its intensity on both ends and took control of the game in the third quarter. Westbeld responded by tying things at 43 apiece with a midrange jumper and then again at 49-all with a 3, her second in a row after the Wolfpack gathered a six-point advantage. Westbeld finished with 16 points and 7 rebounds. Ivey called Westbeld Notre Dame’s “heart and soul.”
“We’ve been in situations like this a lot,” Citron said. “So I think it just comes from doing it. I’m a junior. Maddy is a senior now. We’ve played a good bunch of games. It’s something we’re used to doing.”
Hidalgo, 19, has not been in as many fires as her teammates. In the end, though, the ball was in her hands. And then in the opponent’s basket. It’s been that way for the Irish since November.
Hidalgo made a 3-pointer at the end of the first half and another at the end of the third quarter. Looking back, those six points were as important as any in a game that finished with a five-point margin. She wasn’t going to let Notre Dame lose as long as the game stayed close.
It did. So she went ahead and won it.
“She’s just different,” Citron said. “I don’t even know what to say.”
