Georgia Tech coach Nell Fortner is taking it one game at a time with her No. 13 Yellow Jackets, not looking too far ahead.
The team is one of the five unbeatens left in Division I women’s basketball, joining No. 1 UCLA, No. 6 LSU, No. 8 Maryland and No. 9 Ohio State. The Yellow Jackets might be the biggest surprise
The Yellow Jackets were coming off a 17-16 season and built the non-conference schedule with a lot of home games early on to build up confidence. So far it’s worked as they are 15-0.
“It’s interesting how are schedule played out from the very beginning,” Fortner said in a phone interview Monday. “It gave us a good opportunity to continue to play tougher competition as we went along and not come out of the gates and face super hard competition and lose confidence.”
Fortner saw growth in the team when it came away from a Thanksgiving tournament in Hawaii over South Dakota State and Oregon, holding both schools under 60 points.
“We played different styles of defense against those teams and it helped us in finding ourselves defensively,” she said.
Fortner has always prided herself as a defensive-minded coach first. Georgia Tech is giving up just 56.9 points a game this season.
“Really built ourselves that we’re going to defend,” she said. “Stand on our defense. We had opportunity with our schedule to do that.”
The offense has come around lately as the team scored over 100 points in a game for the first time in nine years in a 100-61 victory over Pitt just before the new year. It was the first 100-point effort against an ACC team since 2008.
“We work hard on defense, it’s been our calling card,” Fortner said. “I think. we just really hunker down defensively. We got some speed to push the ball and go have some fun on offense now.”
Next up for the Yellow Jackets, who entered the rankings for the first time this season five weeks ago, is a home game against Virginia Tech on Thursday. Georgia Tech faces No. 3 Notre Dame on Jan. 16.
The NCAA’s weekly NET rankings — one of the tools the selection committee uses to determine the NCAA Tournament bracket — has South Carolina at No. 1 and Texas second.
UCLA has won its first 15 games and can match the longest streak to start a season when the Bruins visit Purdue on Tuesday. They were 16-0 to begin the 2019-20 season.
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