Syracuse, N.Y. -- Syracuse women’s basketball coach Quentin Hillsman found out via Twitter in the middle of Monday afternoon that his team would open its NCAA Tournament play against Fordham on Saturday in the Carrier Dome.
This can’t be right, he thought. The field wasn’t scheduled to be announced until 7 p.m., on ESPN’s selection show.
"And obviously when you see it released in that manner, you don’t think it’s true,'' Hillsman said Monday night. "You think that somebody’s just kind of threw something out there for you to kind of view. But once they said they were unveiling it at 5 o’clock today, I knew that it was a real bracket.''
It was indeed. And it had SU as a No. 3 seed in the Portland Region and hosting an opening round regional in the Dome.
SU guard Gabrielle Cooper got wind of the news via Twitter as she was walking home from class. Word spread quickly from there as Cooper fired off a text to her team’s group chat.
“I was like, ‘Hey guys, they leaked the bracket,’'' Cooper said Monday night. "As soon as I did that, Lauren (teammate Lauren Fitzmaurice), she always comes with the news. She sent a screenshot of the bracket. And that’s how I found out.''
And while that may have drained much of the drama from Monday night’s selection show party, it hardly took the edge off the Orange’s enthusiasm.
ESPN2 officially broadcast the seedings at 5 p.m, after a shot of the full field was inadvertently released hours earlier on ESPNU. Screen shots of the brackets then spread across social media, spoiling the element of surprise.
ESPN still aired its originally scheduled selection show at 7 p.m. SU players and coaches took their place at the front of Manley Field House auditorium of fans, and when the Orange’s matchup against 14th seeded Fordham was displayed the cheers rolled out without a noticeable loss of luster.
"It’s still exciting because we’re hosting now. So that’s always exciting for it to be confirmed,'' Cooper said. "They could have leaked it and switched it around or something. For it to be set in stone now, it was still exciting.''
Hillsman agreed.
"It really wasn’t (a ruined surprise) because this was our goal the whole time, is to host the first two rounds. I was very excited for our players, I’m very excited for our program,'' he said. "This is what we worked for. And to know that you accomplished that, that was really gratifying and pleasing to me.''
This is the Orange’s seventh-straight trip to the NCAAs (eight times overall under Hillsman) and its No. 3 seed is the highest in program history. The only other time Syracuse hosted an opening round regional was 2016, when it reached the NCAA title game.
"As I’ve been saying from the beginning of the year, we knew that we scheduled right (to get this seed). That’s where it starts,'' Hillsman said. "We just scheduled the right way to win the games that we needed to win to be in this position.
"We understood the urgency. I just know that our kids are going to fight and they’re going to play hard and their goal has been our goal the whole year. Just to be able to host the tournament. And we knew what we needed to do to that. So I’m just really proud of them.''