No. 14 Notre Dame Faces Thursday Battle At Georgia Tech

ATLANTA — It’s back to work for No. 14 Notre Dame (15-4, 5-3), as the Irish head to the Peach State for a Thursday night battle against Georgia Tech (13-8, 4-5). The game will mark the halfway point of ACC play for Notre Dame, who took a break from the conference last week and defeated No. 8 UConn in Storrs. 

“I talk about mindset a lot,” Karen and Kevin Keyes Family Head Coach Niele Ivey said on Wednesday. “We want to come out with the same dominant mindset no matter who we play. Sometimes you need a win like UConn to give us a bar of where we can be as a team and the confidence to go out and compete like we did against UConn every night. It gives us a measure of how we need to approach each game.”

That applies to the remainder of conference play in an ACC with six ranked teams, tied for the most in the nation.

Hannah Hidalgo will now take her talents south to McCamish Pavilion, and the Yellow Jackets will face a near-impossible task: stopping the ACCs leading scorer and the nation’s leader in swipes. Hidalgo is coming off of a career performance against the Huskies, during which she had 34 points, 10 rebounds and 6 assists. The showing broke Notre Dame’s single-game freshman scoring record and the program’s rookie record for most games with at least 30 points. 

But Hidalgo isn’t the only valuable member of a team that won 10 non-conference games this year for the first time under Ivey. Sonia Citron and Maddy Westbeld are seemingly everywhere on the court at all times, knocking down 3s, rebounding or playing suffocating defense. 

Citron — who had the tall task of defending All-American Paige Bueckers on Saturday night, holding her to just 5-17 from the floor — leads the ACC with a 93.3 clip from the free throw line in conference play, and she’s hit 16 of 39 shots from deep (41 percent). She is knocking down 2.7 treys per game, good for second in the league in ACC play.

Westbeld is one of just three ACC players averaging at least 14 points and 9 rebounds this season. The former mark is her highest since she posted 15.2 during her freshman year, and the latter is a career high. She helped seal the deal in Storrs on Saturday, hitting a pair of 3-pointers to send the home team home with a loss. 

Georgia Tech has lost four of its last five games, but the Yellow Jackets faced three ranked teams in that span. They’ve played well at home — they’re shooting 45.7 percent as a team in their own arena — and they have a balanced, three-headed monster in Tonie Morgan, Kara Dunn and Rusne Augustinaite. Morgan and Dunn are the leading scorers, but Augustinaite is the 3-point specialist shooting 37.8 percent from behind the arc. The freshman from Lithuania has made 51 treys this season, which ranks second in the ACC.

Thursday’s game can be streamed on ACCNX, and tipoff is at 7 p.m. Notre Dame is 17-1 all-time against Georgia Tech and has never lost to the Yellow Jackets on the road.