The three Californians on the Princeton women’s basketball roster have all raved to their teammates about In-N-Out Burger. Most of the fast-food chain’s locations are in the Golden State, so many of Princeton’s other players had never tried it.
That changed on Wednesday, the day Princeton arrived in Los Angeles for the first round of the NCAA Tournament. The Tigers went to In-N-Out for dinner and even got some of the restaurant’s paper hats to go with their meals. Junior guards Skye Belker and Ashley Chea and sophomore forward Emily Eadie were all ready to advise their teammates on the menu.
“When I was little, I used to get a 4×4,” Chea said in a Princeton video, referring to a burger that has four patties and four slices of cheese. “But now, I just get a double-double with fries.”
The Tigers found that the meal mostly lived up to the Californians’ hype.
“The girls loved it,” Belker told reporters on Friday. “They said that the fries are OK, but the burger was really good, which — I can respect that. I think the fries are kind of a little healthier vibe for fast food.”
Ninth-seeded Princeton will open its NCAA Tournament against eighth-seeded Oklahoma State at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. Pacific time. If the Tigers win, they could face top-seeded UCLA on Monday.
Related reading: Princeton-Oklahoma State: Same style, same colors, one ticket to the second round
Chea and Belker are from Los Angeles and played for Flintridge Prep and Windward School, respectively. Eadie is from Newport Beach, about an hour southeast of Los Angeles, and played for Sage Hill School. So UCLA is about as close to home as any of them could get.
“We don’t get a lot of our family out to our games usually, and so we’re gonna have a lot of support,” Belker said. “… Definitely feels like a home game for us, so we’re really excited.”
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As the Tigers watched the selection show on Sunday, where they would go was the main intrigue. They’d won the Ivy League Tournament, so they already knew they’d make the NCAA Tournament as the conference’s automatic qualifier.
Junior guard/forward Fadima Tall posted a TikTok video of the Princeton players, the coaches and even head coach Carla Berube’s son Parker guessing where they’d play. The range of guesses spanned the country, from UCLA to Duke to UConn to Texas.
“I knew that [going to Los Angeles] was a possibility,” Eadie told The IX Basketball on Friday. “But since this was kind of the only team on the West Coast that we could potentially play, I was not trying to get my hopes up.”
“When our name popped up and it was in the Sacramento [regional], we were like, ‘There’s just no way this is happening,’” Chea told The IX Basketball.
This trip gives Chea, Belker and Eadie some rare time close to home during the season. They go home for just a few days over Christmas, and the only other time in their careers that Princeton has played in California was in November 2023. Belker and Chea were first-years then, and Princeton took then-No. 3 UCLA to the wire, losing 77-74. Belker had 20 points that day on 6-for-8 shooting in just her third college game.
Eadie, though, wasn’t on the team yet, and Princeton has more time out west on this trip than it did then.
It’s spent a lot of that time watching film and practicing. Defensive rebounding has been a huge point of emphasis, as Princeton has struggled with it at times throughout the season. Former Tiger and current WNBA player Kaitlyn Chen — who’s from nearby San Marino — even stopped by practice on Thursday.
“I think the biggest thing is sticking to our game as a team,” Belker said about preparing for Oklahoma State. “We’re not changing up our whole style of play. We’re sticking to what’s been working all season and trusting each other.”
But the Tigers have also spent some of their extra time letting their hometown players show them around Los Angeles and soaking up the warm weather. With high temperatures in the mid-80s, the players have done some tanning. The team stopped for frozen yogurt after Thursday’s dinner, fulfilling a request from Chea, and it also visited the Third Street Promenade and the basketball courts at Venice Beach.
“It’s been really fun seeing … my teammates check out the spots that I grew up in, playing basketball in and everything,” Belker said.
“They’ve been, I think, just on top of the world seeing their family and showing us around,” Berube told reporters on Friday about the trio.
Princeton is a program that prides itself on handling business on the road, so these excursions might seem out of character. But Berube knows that her players need those doses of fun and trusts them to focus on basketball when it’s time. After all, she saw them do that on a November trip to the Bahamas, where they beat Penn State and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.
“You’re out here; you’re not going to sit in the hotel and just do that all day long. You’ve gotta just enjoy the journey,” Berube said. “And I think that’s what we’ve done this year. … We have such an experienced group that knows the difference between water slides and beating Penn State. And so I think it’s also the difference between being at Venice Beach and also being locked in and ready to win [on Saturday].”
The Tigers also have enviable experience in March Madness to lean on. Seniors Madison St. Rose and Taylor Charles were first-years when No. 10 seed Princeton upset No. 7 seed North Carolina State and nearly topped No. 2 seed Utah. The Tigers have made the tournament in the last two seasons, too, losing to West Virginia in the first round in 2024 and Iowa State in the First Four in 2025. Most of last season’s core players returned this season, and now they’re a year older and more experienced.
“Being in a situation like this before, we know how to handle the pressure that comes with it and … treat this like a normal game,” Eadie said. “We’ve experienced so much, we’ve done a lot to get to this point, and I think just treating it as such will help us along the way.”
So it’s a normal game but a special road trip for the Tigers, and they’ll look to extend it as long as possible with a win on Saturday. They don’t want to just be in and out.
The IX Basketball’s David Mendez-Yapkowitz contributed reporting for this story from Los Angeles. Read all our NCAA Tournament coverage at The IX Sports.
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