The Kent State women’s basketball season will continue.
The Women’s National Invitational Tournament announced Sunday that the Flashes would be part of its 64-team field. Pairings and game time and location will be announced Monday afternoon.
The WNIT is for teams that won their conferences’ regular-season championship but didn’t qualify for the NCAA Tournament, along with about 30 at-large teams.
Kent State is one of five MAC teams invited to the tournament. The others are regular-season champion Toledo (26-5); Akron (17-11), which finished third in the league; Ball State (20-12), which finished fourth and lost to Buffalo in the MAC Tournament finals; and Ohio (15-14), which finished eighth in the league.
The Flashes finished the season 18-11 and 10-10 in the MAC, tied for sixth place. League tiebreaker rules pushed KSU out of the eight-team MAC Tournament.
This week’s game will be the sixth WNIT game KSU history. The Flashes won their first WNIT game two years ago at Green Bay 64-59, then lost to Butler in the second round 70-52. The WNIT win over Green Bay was the second postseason win in Kent State history. In 1996, the Flashes beat Texas A&M 72-68 in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
All WNIT games are played on campus sites. A team can bid to host a home game (the WNIT charges thousands of dollars). Other factors for receiving home games are teams’ records and typical home attendance.
The tournament has seeding, after a fashion. Early-round games are scheduled in the same geographical area, and within those areas, higher-ranked teams play lower-ranked ones in the first round.
Kent State’s closest possible first-round opponent is Youngstown State (24-6), which finished second in the Horizon League but was upset in the first round of the league tournament. The next closest is Bucknell (23-9), which lost to American University 65-54 in the finals of the Patriot League Tournament. Bucknell is in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, about 260 miles from Kent.
Next comes Purdue (16-14), which finished seventh in the Big Ten and lost in the first round of its conference tournament. It’s about 340 miles away. After that, we’re looking at teams 400 or more miles away: Drexel (26-5, in Philadelphia), Seton Hall (19-12, in southern New Jersey), Virginia Commonwealth (15-11, in Richmond), Fordham (18-10, in New York City), and Liberty (27-4, in Lynchburg, Virginia).
At 571 miles, Green Bay was by far the longest way Kent State has traveled for a first-round WNIT game. In 2017, the Flashes played at the University of Michigan, an easy three-hour drive.