San Diego State women’s basketball came into the Mountain West quarterfinals March 8 rightfully confident — 25-5 overall, 19-1 in conference play, defending tournament champions and regular-season winners, with a roster loaded with honors.
Guard Nala Williams, the Mountain West Player of the Year. Kaelyn Hamilton, Sixth Player of the Year. Naomi Panganiban, First Team All-Mountain West. Head coach Stacie Terry-Hutson, the conference’s Coach of the Year.
But games aren’t won on paper.
Ninth-seeded Air Force erased a six-point halftime deficit to stun the top-seeded Aztecs in their third matchup of the season, after SDSU had swept their regular-season games. The loss ended San Diego State’s Mountain West Tournament run before it began, eliminating the possibility of a second consecutive trip to March Madness.
The good news: San Diego State’s season isn’t over. The Aztecs received an invitation to the NCAA Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament and will host UC Irvine at 6 p.m. Thursday at the University of San Diego’s Jenny Craig Pavilion, with the game streamed on ESPN+.
“I don’t want to get too high or too low, because we’ve had a fantastic season this year,” head coach Stacie Terry-Hutson said. “We’ve played an amazing brand of basketball for about five months now, and we’re not going to let one loss dictate or dampen the season that we’ve had. To go 19-1 in this conference was a challenging feat. Really proud of our kids, and we know this isn’t the last game for us. We’re going to bottle this up and get better for postseason play.”
San Diego State returns to the postseason for the third time in four years. The Aztecs hold a 21-9 record all-time against UC Irvine, which won their last meeting in the 2023 WNIT. The Anteaters arrive at 26-6, having claimed the Big West regular-season title before falling in overtime to Hawai’i in the conference semifinals.
The 32-team WBIT, launched by the NCAA in 2024, holds early rounds at campus sites, with the semifinals and championship set for Wichita, Kansas. Thursday’s game will be played at the University of San Diego, as Viejas Arena is unavailable while hosting the first two rounds of the men’s NCAA Tournament.
“[The Mountain West] is a one-bid league, so whoever wins the conference tournament will get invited to the NCAA,” Terry-Hutson said. “I do hope [the selection committee] sees the body of work that we’ve put together and considered us. There are other tournaments that we are happy to play in, and I know our girls will be ready.”
“I huddled them before the [Air Force game], and I was just telling them how special this group is,” she added. “They’ve done things this year that I have never been a part of. This is a very, very special team, and I’m really excited for what they were able to put together. There (were) a lot of question marks coming into the season because we had lost so much last year, graduated a lot and we had a very young team, but these kids are resilient and competitive and highly unselfish. That has allowed us to put the season together that we have. Although we’re disappointed, although I’m disappointed, I am very, very proud of this team.”
If the Aztecs advance past UC Irvine, they would face the winner of No. 1 seed Texas A&M and McNeese State in the second round.
San Diego State will look to ride the hot hand in sophomore guard Naomi Panganiban. The 5-foot-7 guard led the team in scoring this season and notched a game-high 29 points in the loss to Air Force, nearly single-handedly keeping the Aztecs in the game.
“Naomi is already a fantastic player, but she can continue to grow in a lot of different aspects,” Terry-Hutson said. “I thought she kind of put us on her back and made some big-time shots. That’s just who she is. We talk about having a little dog in us, and she definitely has that. She’s a competitor, and when the lights are on, she’s always ready.”
Panganiban, a San Diego native and 1,000-point scorer at La Jolla Country Day, has been a natural fit with Terry-Hutson, also a local native.
Last season, when Panganiban was a freshman, the two shared a quintessential San Diegan moment during a January 2025 Road trip to Laramie for a game against Mountain West rival Wyoming. With snow falling outside the Arena-Auditorium and temperatures hovering around 12 degrees, Terry-Hutson turned to Panganiban on the bench and asked, “Why would you want to live here?”
Looking ahead, Terry-Hutson emphasized that defensive focus will be key if the Aztecs hope to make a deep WBIT run. Against UC Irvine, that starts with containing the Anteaters’ high-scoring backcourt of Hunter Hernandez and Jada Wynn.
“Defensively we have to play with a little bit more toughness and discipline than we did [against Air Force],” she said. “So we’ll go back and watch film and just kind of get back to who we are and what got us to 25-5 thus far, and hoping to play quite a few more games of basketball.”
Tickets for the SDSU-UC Irvine game at the WBIT are $23 for adults. They are free for students of all ages with ID.
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