Haley Cavinder shushed the Indiana crowd, who was taunting her the entire game.
I don’t like it unless it’s my team. I can say it, I know it, I like when my team does it and I hate it when *they* do it.
I’ll say this, the women’s game got a lot of attention for their aggression this year. Most of y’all don’t know there was a fight (and assault charge) after a women’s NIT game:
Or a less physical but still intense altercation between two players in the Lou-UT game:
I think the worst part about the women’s game is the officiating, which is game-by-game some of the worst I’ve seen in any sport, and I have a child in 8u baseball. There’s no consistency between games, so many missed calls, and a weird degree of home favoritism that I don’t see anywhere else. I’m not saying they’re all bad, but they usually feel overwhelmed, and it may be due to the sport having a fairly meteoritic rise in attention.
Also, LSU and South Carolina straight up body other teams. They play like a men’s squad, using their size and physicality in aggressive, assertive play styles that intentionally disrupt their opponents. It’s a sharp contrast to the more fluid, less physical style of most of the rest of the country. I would expect more teams to do that going forward, which naturally increases the level of anger and frustration from their opponents, right or wrongly.
I have no feelings on Iowa-LSU, and my only thought is that whoever was pulling for Iowa hated the gesture and whoever was pulling for LSU loved it.