Adia Barnes And Arizona Look To Make History Against Texas A&M

TUCSON, AZ — The Arizona Wildcats women's basketball team on Wednesday lived up to an old adage about March Madness: "Survive and advance."

That's because the third-seeded Wildcats survived and advanced against 11th-seed Brigham Young University in the tournament's second round.

The Wildcats' 52-46 victory set up a matchup with second-seeded Texas A&M, which enters Saturday night's Sweet 16 contest with a 25-2 mark for the year.

It'll be Arizona's first Sweet 16 appearance since 1998, when a senior point guard by the name of Adia Barnes led the Wildcats to wins over Santa Clara and Virginia before falling to second-seeded Connecticut 74-57.

Fast-forward 23 years, and it's Barnes who's leading the Wildcats back into the round-of-16 matchup, this time as the Wildcats head coach.

The fifth-year head coach described her road to San Antonio's Alamodome, where Saturday night's matchup with the Aggies will take place.

"Right now, we're inexperienced. We've never done this," Barnes told Patch on Thursday. "This is uncharted territory. It hasn't been easy. But I'm just so proud of the way we've handled it. And, you know, to be in the Sweet 16 is amazing. No one believed it."

The Wildcats path to the 2021 Sweet 16 was anything but smooth.

When Barnes was hired to be the team's head coach in 2016, the Wildcats were in the midst of a decade-plus-long NCAA Tournament drought.

Things appeared forelorn at first for Tucson's prodigal daughter, with Arizona posting records of 14-16 and 6-21 in Barnes' first two seasons running the show.

Things began to turn around for the program during the 2018-'19 season, however, as Arizona posted a 24-13 record and qualified for the Women's National Invitational Tournament.

The team never looked back, running the table in the single-elimination event en route to the school's second-ever WNIT title in front of a soldout crowd of 14,655 spectators at McKale Center.

From there, Barnes and company ripped off the school's best season in 20 years, posting a 24-7 record with a 12-6 mark in Pac-12 conference play in 2019-20.

The Wildcats were in high position to land a high enough seed in the 2020 NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament to host their first two games.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, canceling the event and throwing the program's progress into the dustbin of history.

But Barnes and her veteran lineup, led by fifth-year guard Aari McDonald, didn't waste any time, going 17-5 and earning a berth in the 2021 NCAA tournament.

The head coach described to members of the media how far the program's come since that 2019 WNIT run, saying the team's current run wouldn't have been possible without that experience.

"It prepared us tremendously because it gave us one extra month of play for one-and-done-style games," Barnes said. "And I think that gave us a lot of momentum, a lot of confidence moving into last year. And besides that — besides, like, our basketball stuff on the floor as a team — it got the city [so] energized that it woke the women's basketball fans in Tucson. And then it kind of made things happen. It was like an avalanche for this team."

Nobody understands how fast that progress has occurred more than McDonald, who was named the 2021 Pac-12 Player of the Year and was an All-Pac-12 selection in each of her three seasons in Tucson.

McDonald, who transferred to Tucson from the University of Washington, where she was recruited when Barnes was the Huskies' assistant coach, said this year's run has been extra special for her given everything she's experienced.

"Our goal coming into the year was to win the Pac-12, and we fell short of that, but just the growth that I've seen," McDonald said. "This team, not just making the tournament but surviving and advancing, I feel, like, now that we're here, the work doesn't stop. I had big goals, and I've accomplished a lot of them. So I kept the faith, and I trusted coach Barnes."

One of those goals for McDonald and Barnes is to guide Arizona to the school's first women's Elite Eight appearance.

The duo can do just that against the Aggies at 5 p.m. Arizona time in San Antonio on Saturday. Doing so would be an upset win for Barnes, though it would be far from the biggest one of her half-decade run in Tucson.

"We're so zoned in, and we're so focused, we're not satisfied because we're at the Sweet 16. We want to win," Barnes said. "Wherever we want to play, we want to go. We have nothing to lose. We've never been here before. So for us, it's one game at a time. We're honing in on that. Everybody's good at this time, and everybody can win any game."