Jackson State falls just short of historic upset, but its story is still one of March Madness' best
Jackson State had never won a March Madness game. Neither had its conference, nor any No. 14 seed in the NCAA women's basketball tournament. One-hundred and eleven had tried. All had failed. And nobody, not a soul outside Jackson, Mississippi, expected the 112th to succeed.
Especially not early in the third quarter on Saturday in Baton Rouge, when third-seeded LSU and its national champion coach led by 17.
But then the Lady Tigers, led by Tomekia Reed, their inspirational coach, and by Ameshya Williams-Holliday, their star player who doubles as a wife and mother, nearly did the unthinkable.
They stormed back from down 47-30 to take a stunning 10-point lead.
A raucous crowd at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center fell silent.
History beckoned. The best story of March blossomed. Kim Mulkey, the fiery LSU coach who'd won titles at Baylor, nearly discarded her golden jacket and brought disbelieving hands to her blonde-haired head.
In the end, her Tigers survived, 83-77. In a cauldron of noise and intensity, LSU responded with an 11-0 run of its own. Khayla Pointer broke a tie with 49 seconds to go, with her 24th, 25th and 26th points of the game. The No. 3 seed escaped. Mulkey bowed her head, then shook it, oozing relief.
"Oh my God," Pointer said, to herself and others, repeatedly.
"Oh my God."
She'd envisioned the scene in the locker room, taking her LSU jersey off for the final time, tears soaking everything.
It hadn't materialized, but it's the scene Jackson State had envisioned too, the scenario that would have made them March darlings. "Hey, Kim Mulkey got it coming baby!" Reed had screamed when brackets were released. The video made its way to Mulkey, who said it became bulletin board material, but the Lady Tigers didn't care.
They'd talked about the "rise of the underdog." They'd worn shirts to Saturday's game with the phrase. They were 15.5-point dogs, but on cue, they rose early in the second half. The turning point?
"The tech," star guard Miya Crump said.
With the Lady Tigers down 15, Reed got T'd up. "I'm glad he called it," she later said of the ref. "That fueled us," Crump said. They clawed back, to within seven, then five. They took a lead, then extended it and their fans who'd traveled down Interstate-55 roared.
And in that moment, they were the story.
There was Reed, stalking the sidelines as the architect, the personable and empathetic recruiter, who'd taken the job in 2018 with no prior Division I head-coaching experience.
There was Williams-Holliday, a once-prized recruit who'd left Mississippi State in 2017 and fallen off the basketball map. She'd decided she was done — with hoops, with college. She cited personal reasons. Reed, who'd recruited her out of high school, texted her, day after day; Williams — her name at the time — didn't respond.
"Could you please respond to let me know that you're OK?" Reed wrote.
Reed, at the time, was the head coach at Hinds Community College, her alma mater. She wasn't a big-time coach in need of a center. She was just an adult who cared about a struggling young woman. Williams responded that day. They began corresponding regularly.
Months later, Reed got the Jackson State job. She reached out to Williams, "begging her to come play." Williams resisted. She said she didn't like to run. You don't have to run, we'll figure that out, Reed told her. Thirty minutes later, Reed says, Williams sent back a picture of a pregnancy test.
"I don't care," Reed told her. "I just want you in school."
A couple months later, Williams enrolled at Jackson State. Six months after that, she gave birth to her son, Jace. She transitioned to online classes while taking care of him, working late at night on a laptop Reed had shipped her, sometimes with Jace in her lap.
And then, in 2019, with childcare support from her mother and grandmother, Williams, along with Reed, set out to build the Lady Tigers into one of the best mid-major programs in women's basketball.
Other transfers and high-school recruits followed. A perennial Southwestern Athletic Conference power emerged. It won the league in 2021. A season later, Williams-Holliday — who met her husband by beating him in one-on-one basketball, and added his name to hers — scored in double figures without fail. She developed into a WNBA prospect. She won SWAC Player of the Year. Reed won Coach of the Year. The Lady Tigers won 21 straight.
The upset of LSU was the storybook ending, the tale that would have overtaken the tournament. Over three agonizing minutes of basketball, it fizzled out.
But the beginning and middle of this story? And most of the end? They still exist. They're still ongoing.
"Even though this is her last game for Jackson State University," Reed said of Williams-Holliday, "she is gonna continue to open the door for our conference, for our institution, for our HBCU community."
"She has grown tremendously," Reed said. "As a young lady, as a woman, as a wife, as a mother. She's helped make me a better person. She's helped me believe. She's the one who has built this program."
And that program's rise isn't finished. Not with leaders like Reed; and players like Crump, who had 21 points Saturday, and who's just a junior.
"We have to continue to fight for our institution, for our conference, for our culture," Reed said. "We have to continue to knock on walls to get respect."
They earned plenty of it Saturday, even if they didn't quite earn history.
"We're knocking on walls," Reed continued. "But now it's time to come back and knock the walls down."
