By Terry Boehmker
NKyTribune sports reporter
Marie Kiefer doesn’t want her record-setting senior season on the Ball State University women’s basketball team to end. The 6-foot-2 forward will do whatever she can to keep that from happening on Friday when the Cardinals take on Ole Miss in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.
Kiefer is a 2001 Brossart High School graduate who has been in Ball State’s starting lineup the last four seasons. She enters Friday’s 6 p.m. game on ESPNU as the team’s all-time leader in blocked shots (197). As a senior, she set the single-season record with 60 and was named Defensive Player of the Year in the Mid-American Conference.
Kiefer is also averaging 7.4 points and a team-high 7.2 rebounds for the Cardinals, who are making their second NCAA Tournament appearance as conference champions. The last time Ball State made it to the tournament was 2009 and that team upset Tennessee in the first round.
In one 16-team bracket for this year’s tournament, Ole Miss (20-10) is seeded No. 5 and Ball State (27-7) is No. 12. If the Cardinals pull off the upset, they’ll set the team record for most wins in a season under head coach Brady Sallee.
A win would also improve Kiefer’s chances of reaching the 1,000 mark in career scoring. Her current total is 979 points.
Sallee recruited Kiefer the summer before her senior season at Brossart. In her final high school season, she was named 10th Region Player of the Year after posting team-high averages of 19.6 points and 11 rebounds per game.
Brossart won the 10th Region tournament that year and Kiefer earned a spot on the Kentucky All-Stars team. In the annual two-game series against Indiana’s top seniors, Kiefer set an all-star team record with eight blocks in two games while also getting 16 points and 22 rebounds.
Other former Northern Kentucky players on women’s teams in the NCAA tournament are Ryle graduate Maddie Scherr (Texas Christian University) and Cooper graduates Maleah Alexander (Liberty University) and Whitney Lind (Lehigh University).
Scherr sat out this season while recovering from a back injury and Alexander is a freshman who has not played in any games. Lind is averaging 5.9 points and 2.2 rebounds off the bench for her Lehigh team that will play Duke in a first-round game at 8 p.m. Friday on ESPNU.
Another former Ryle player, Lauren Schwartz, is an assistant coach on the University of Washington women’s team that lost to Columbia, 63-60, in a play-in game on Thursday for a spot in the NCAA 64-team tournament field.