UVA women’s basketball gets NIT bid, plays first-round game at ODU

The UVA women’s basketball team (17-13, 7-9 ACC) earned the Atlantic Coast Conference’s automatic bid to the 2015 Postseason Women’s National Invitation Tournament and will play its first round game at Old Dominion (20-12) on Thursday, March 19 in Norfolk, Va. The game time will be announced on Tuesday.

The 2015 WNIT will feature 64 schools, 32 with automatic bids and 32 at-large teams, in a single-elimination championship format. The Postseason WNIT will open with first-round games Wednesday throughFriday, March 18-20. The event culminates Saturday, April 4 with the championship game.

Exact game dates, locations and times for subsequent-round games will be announced as the tournament progresses.

This is Virginia’s fifth trip to the WNIT, having reached the quarterfinals in 2006, 2007, 2011 and 2012. Head coach Joanne Boyle won the WNIT championship in 2010 while coaching at California.

The Postseason WNIT, now in its 18th year, began in 1998 with 16 teams playing for a postseason crown and has since expanded four times. Following the inaugural year, the field doubled to 32 teams and remained there until 2006 when the WNIT expanded to a 40-team field to give berths to teams that won their regular-season conference title but did not win their conference tournament and therefore were excluded from the NCAA Tournament. The WNIT furthered that commitment to conference schools again in 2007, when the event expanded to 48 teams and awarded an automatic berth to each conference. The number of at-large berths remained at 17 until 2010, when the WNIT felt that the level of women’s basketball warranted a 64-team field. Since then, the WNIT fulfills berths for 32 automatic teams and 32 teams selected at-large.