BLACKSBURG, Va. — Bella Fontleroy was almost a Hokie.
When the former four-star prospect was coming out of high school in Springfield, Missouri, she picked Baylor over a few other top programs, including Virginia Tech.
She had one of her best games of the season to help the No. 5-seeded Bears advance to the second round, where they will take on No. 4 Virginia Tech on Sunday at 7 p.m. at Cassell Coliseum.
“I’m definitely very fired up,” Fontleroy said. “It’s a great school and they have a great staff, but I’m excited to go up against them. They do a lot of things well, and I think that our versatility and our style of play will match up well against theirs.”
There is no malice in the sophomore, even if her 19-point, 11-rebound double-double on Friday did show Virginia Tech coach Kenny Brooks what he was missing out on.
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“I think she was motivated for this moment,” Baylor head coach Nicki Collen said. “She’s pretty fearless. When her first shot goes in, it gives her a ton of confidence. She feeds off of that.”
Playing against size has been Baylor’s bugaboo this season.
The Bears have given up big games to Kansas’ Taiyanna Jackson (27 points, 19 rebounds), Iowa State’s Audi Crooks (23 points, 6 rebounds) and BYU’s Lauren Gustin (23 points, 16 rebounds).
Virginia Tech’s three-time ACC Player of the Year and two-time All-American, 6-foot-6 center Elizabeth Kitley, is out for the tournament after tearing her ACL in the regular season finale. The Hokies are 2-2 since she went down.
Her replacement, 6-foot-5 freshman Clara Strack was solid in her first start against Marshall, finishing a perfect seven-for-seven from the floor and scoring 17 points in her first start of the season.
“She’s a freshman, and we’re grad seniors,” Dre’Una Edwards said of her and Aijha Blackwell battling in the post. “We’re going to try to give her the best look that we can just to welcome her to March Madness.”
Baylor was the first team to play Texas after All-American point guard Rori Harmon’s season-ending injury was announced, and Collen said it can take teams a little time to get adjusted.
“They were kind of in that phase in the ACC tournament of figuring it out a little bit,” she said. “Yesterday, they were incredibly poised against the press, got good shots and made shots. They’re a team that is good from the three-point line, and they can still play into the paint.”
Baylor and Virginia Tech have only met once before, in the 2021 NCAA Tournament in San Antonio.
Senior guard Sarah Andrews played six minutes and scored three points for the Bears, who dominated the Hokies in a 90-48 second-round game, but doesn’t remember much about her freshman year.
Virginia Tech coaches and players very vividly remember that game, a seminal moment that helped them get to where they are now.
Amoore, then a freshman, scored a team-high 18 points for the Hokies. Kitley scored six points and grabbed six rebounds, while then-freshman and current senior Cayla King finished with six points.
“That game for me was a defining factor,” Amoore said. “Playing against those girls and seeing the standard that they held themselves to was eye-opening to me. I’ve still got a bad taste in my mouth from the Baylor loss. It’s a different team, it’s just the same uniform.”
In the three seasons since that game, Virginia Tech has three straight top-3 finishes in the ACC with one conference title, three NCAA Tournament appearances and one Final Four.
“That game taught us what we needed to be to get to the next level,” Brooks said. “What we took from that is, if you want to be at that level, you’ve got to have confidence like that, and we saw how hard we needed to compete to get to that level.”
The Hokies have been dominant inside Cassell Coliseum, pushing their home winning streak to 26 straight games with the first-round win over Marshall.
The average margin of victory for Virginia Tech has been more than 21 points per game in that span, and this season has seen seven of the top 10 highest-attended games in the last eight years.
The Bears, having experienced hostile environments in Austin, Ames and Morgantown, know what to expect.
“I feel like we’re not just playing against five players tomorrow, we’re playing against 10,005 because the energy in this building will be insane,” Collen said. “The people here will take it very, very personally to help this team and be kind of a sixth man.”
Baylor feels like, right now, the confidence level is closer to what it was in the first part of the season when the Bears won 14 straight games to start the season and climbed to No. 4 in the AP Poll.
“I see that firepower in our eyes,” Andrews said. “We’re 1-0 right now. We know the next game is not guaranteed, so we can’t take any plays off because that one play you take all could be the play that costs you the game.
“Not everybody has a chance to be in this tournament, so we’re just ready to play.”
