Hannah Hidalgo shows she’s more than a scorer in NCAA Tournament debut

If you tuned in to Hannah Hidalgo’s NCAA Tournament debut on Saturday expecting to see her score a pile of points, you didn’t get it. But you did get to see plenty of reasons why the freshman from South Jersey already is one of the nation’s best players.

Hidalgo had 14 points, 11 assists, six steals, and two rebounds to help No. 2 seed Notre Dame beat a feisty No. 15-seeded Kent State, 81-67, before a sellout crowd at the Fighting Irish’s Purcell Pavilion.

» READ MORE: From South Jersey to Notre Dame, Hannah Hidalgo’s fast-rising star reaches its first NCAA Tournament

“She’s going to find you if you’re open, so I think just credit to her,” said Fighting Irish guard Sonia Citron, who turned some of those assists into a game-high 29 points.

“She was finding me in transition, and I was running trying to get ahead of Kent State. We’ve just been playing together for so long, so we’ve kind of just built that chemistry just playing together.”

Hidalgo’s steal and assist totals were one short of program records for NCAA Tournament games.

It wasn’t always an easy afternoon, but Hidalgo, who’s from Merchantville and attended Paul VI High School rarely looked flustered. Some of her assists were highlight-reel passes, and she drove the lane fiercely, even though she didn’t always finish.

“The energy of the game, she was probably just [having] a little bit of jitters” early on, Notre Dame coach Niele Ivey said. “Some of her shots weren’t falling, and then she finally got a couple steals and a couple easy, wide-open baskets, full-court off of her defensive energy. And I thought that really ignited her.”

Kent State gave it a good effort, winning the third quarter, 16-10, and pulling within 79-65 with two minutes to go. But the Irish put the clamps down defensively from there.

» READ MORE: South Jersey’s Hannah Hidalgo is an AP All-American

“I told the entire team, just in general, of March Madness and what that means,” said Ivey, who won a national championship as a Notre Dame player in 2001 and as an assistant to her predecessor, Philadelphia-born Muffet McGraw, in 2018. She also said she had individual conversations with Hidalgo and fellow freshman guard Anna DeWolfe.

“When you’ve never been in this moment, you don’t understand the magnitude of it,” Ivey said. “We’ve talked about that and what that means as far as coming out here with the sense of urgency to play for great basketball for 40 minutes. No matter what the seeding, or no matter having home-court advantage.”

Notre Dame will next face the winner of Saturday’s Mississippi-Marquette game on Monday at Purcell Pavillion (time and broadcast TBD). The winner will move on to Albany, N.Y., for the Sweet 16.