UNC women's basketball defeats South Carolina, advances to Elite 8

STANFORD, Calif. — Brittany Rountree was 19 years old, the clock paused at 12.7 seconds and the North Carolina women’s basketball team clinging to a two-point lead when she made her way to the free throw line.

It was Jan. 8, 2012 , and on that Chapel Hill Sunday, Rountree’s 1-for-2 foul shot performance near the game’s end set Maryland’s Alyssa Thomas up for the game’s tying shot. Thomas knocked it down, sent the game into overtime. Maryland won .

Now a junior, Rountree still hasn’t forgotten how deeply that feeling stung. How dejected she felt when the final buzzer sounded.

“Yes, I remember that,” she said. “I remember that, and after that game I stayed in the gym just shooting free throws, I was so upset.”

Fast forward two years.

Sunday, in North Carolina’s 65-58 victory against top-seeded South Carolina to advance to the Elite 8, Rountree found herself on the line again — three more times to be exact, her routine the same each time .

“I catch the ball, I do two dribbles, I spin it,” she said. “I have a knee sleeve on my right leg and not on my left, so my shorts usually get caught ... then I shoot the ball.”

In a 28-second period, Rountree launched six foul shots.

She made five.

And for the first time since their 1994 National Championship year, the Tar Heels knocked off a No. 1 seed. They’ll play No. 2 seeded Stanford Tuesday for a battle to the Final Four .

“That answer is a yes,” said associate head coach Andrew Calder of planning to feed Rountree the ball in the final minutes. “We were up one ... tonight the emphasis was to get the ball to Brittany at the end of the game.”

And she executed.

The locker room buzzed, as the North Carolina players hugged and yelled. A modest Rountree nestled herself in a corner between her teammates behind the wall, not wanting to put the attention on herself.

Quickly, she began to speak of Diamond DeShields, who led the Tar Heels with 19 points despite only playing 12 minutes in the first half .

DeShields went down with an ankle twist fewer than three minutes into the game trying to defend Aleighsa Welch in transition. Ten minutes later, she hobbled off the court again, this time after aggravating an already-injured knee.

“Coach wanted to sit me for the half, I told him I was ready to play,” DeShields said. “I didn’t want to have that burden on my shoulders of not having done everything that I could to contribute to the team win.”

Calder said her grit was unsurprising — completely expected.

“She’s a competitor like you can’t believe,” he said. “You’re not going to hold her back from being out there, and she’ll be out there on Tuesday night.”

He also thanked Sylvia Hatchell and North Carolina women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance for giving the team motivating pregame speeches.

Hatchell promised her players that they if it made it to the Final Four, she’d join them on the court. And now, they’re one game away.

“We haven’t been here at this point in a while, and we want to see our name in the museum, we want to be able to say we did that, and definitely we want to fight for coach Hatchell,” Rountree said.

“She’ll get to come watch us in Tennessee — just like a mother watching the game.”

And on Sunday, nearly 3,000 miles away, that mother was proud.

sports@dailytarheel.com