After 30-win streak, GCU enters Baylor, NCAAs as underdog

Friday, March 21

Waco, Texas

12:30 p.m.

Grand Canyon

#14 Baylor

Tickets

Photo by: Tanielle Gilbert

After 30-win streak, GCU enters Baylor, NCAAs as underdog

3/20/2025 12:00:00 PM | Women's Basketball, Paul Coro

PRACTICE PHOTO GALLERY

13th-seeded Lopes meet 4th-seeded Bears in Friday 1st-round game

By: Paul Coro

Friday, March 21 \| 12:35 p.m.\| NCAA tournaent first round Foster Pavilion \| Waco, Texas

	(13) GRAND CANYON LOPES (32-2)	at	(4) BAYLOR BEARS (27-7)

WATCH: ESPNU \| STATS: View

WACO, Texas – By the time the Grand Canyon women's basketball team began the new year with its conference opener, the Lopes were juggernauts who had won 11 games in a row and swept the in-state teams.

In the WAC, they were never an underdog and played like it, stretching their winning streak to 30 with only one game decided by single digits until their three-point WAC Tournament championship win … until Friday.

The GCU women's first NCAA Division I tournament game sends them to perennial power Baylor, where a full Foster Pavilion and ESPNU broadcast awaits with three national championship banners from the Lopes players' lifetimes.

GCU practices at Baylor's Foster Pavilion to prepare for an NCAA tournament first-round game.

GCU practices at Baylor's Foster Pavilion to prepare for an NCAA tournament first-round game.

"We had a target on our back every time we went to a conference game or the WAC Tournament," Lopes senior guard Alyssa Durazo-Frescas said. "Now we're the underdogs. We don't have anything to lose. Baylor has everything to lose. We're going to go in there and fight, claw, scratch, everything we can to come out with the win."

Regional No. 13 seed GCU (32-2) has the nation's longest active winning streak of 30 games, a WAC record, and has the second-best shooting percentage and sixth-best steals average in the nation. The Lopes boast the WAC Player of the Year (senior guard Trinity San Antonio), WAC Defensive Player of the Year (graduate forward Tiarra Brown), nation's No. 10 shooting (graduate forward Laura Erikstrup) and the national leader for 3-pointers made (Durazo-Frescas).

But with regional No. 4 seed Baylor ranked 14th in the AP Top 25, and NCAA Evaluation Tool putting the Bears 15th and the Lopes 61^st, GCU enters new, 7,500-seat Foster Pavilion as an underdog just as the Bears return their top player, junior forward Darianna Littlepage-Buggs, from an in-season knee procedure.

Baylor (27-7), in its 21st consecutive NCAA tournament, went 6-2 without Littlepage-Buggs, an all-Big 12 first-team honoree, because it still has size and scoring without her. The Bears are the only Big 12 team with five double-digit scorers.

GCU practices at Baylor's Foster Pavilion to prepare for an NCAA tournament first-round game.

"What a run," Lopes fifth-year head coach Molly Miller said of not losing since Nov. 18 at Oregon. "We are just going there to win. We want to make it 31.

"There is pressure to win this game because that is exactly what we're going to go do. The pressure to win the (WAC) championship helped us because we had to win a really different way. We grinded that thing out. We got stops. We won ugly. I'll take ugly dancing every day."

GCU, one of six programs make its first NCAA D-I tournament appearance, is using its 69-66 win at Arizona on Dec. 5 as an encouraging comp because of Baylor's 81-76 overtime win in Tucson about a month later.

"They play like they expect to win," Baylor fourth-year coach Nicki Collen said of the Lopes. "They've played in more close games than you think. But they get to the fourth (quarter), and they know how to finish. There's a confidence because of that win streak that they know they're going to find a way to get it done."

Baylor stack a size advantage with three players 6 feet and taller across the front line. The Bears block 4.6 shots per game and outrebound teams by an average of 7.4 per game.

Littlepage-Buggs will return on a minutes restriction, but she was the only Big 12 player averaging a double-double this season with 14.3 points and 10.5 rebounds per game.

"It's not going to be the same as before she was injured, but certainly the energy, the rim runs, the rebounds, her ability to screen and play in space is really important for us," Cullen said.

GCU will counter some of the hard-court advantage at Foster, where Baylor was 15-2 this season, with a group of Havocs traveling to Waco and the cool of an all-senior rotation that won its last seven road games.

"The only underdog is the seeding," Miller said.

GCU practices at Baylor's Foster Pavilion to prepare for an NCAA tournament first-round game.

Collen expects GCU to unleash its defensive pressure with "nothing to lose" on Baylor's two-man game and pro style that nets 78 points per game. Baylor is 18-2 when hosting the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament.

"We're projected to lose a lot in this tournament," San Antonio said. "Just to be able to prove what we can show, that's underdog mentality."

If GCU can become the first WAC women's basketball team to win an NCAA tournament gave since 2004, the Lopes would face the winner of fifth-seeded Ole Miss vs. 12th-seeded Ball State.

"It started in the summer," Miller said. "We said we're going to win a championship in June. We didn't say we were going to win a championship in March."