As Oklahoma State head coach Jacie Hoyt walked through the handshake line on Saturday, she paused and smiled as she approached Princeton senior guard Madison St. Rose. Her eighth-seeded Cowgirls had just beaten ninth-seeded Princeton 82-68 in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, but Hoyt wanted to tell St. Rose how highly the Cowgirls’ staff thought of her.
“We sat around as coaches and probably spent the most time discussing how we were going to guard her,” Hoyt told reporters postgame. “She’s just the type of player who forces you to be at your best as a coach, and it was important for me to tell her how much I respect her for that.”
In her final game in a Princeton uniform, St. Rose had a team-high 17 points, four rebounds, two assists and two steals. She scored on post-ups, pull-up jumpers, and-ones and backdoor cuts — and nearly on a halfcourt heave at the third-quarter buzzer. Her final basket came with under a minute left, when she fought for an offensive rebound and putback even though Princeton trailed by 19.
“She has just set such a great standard of what it means to love this game, to love the uniform that you put on every day, [to] love … your teammates,” Princeton head coach Carla Berube told reporters postgame. “… I feel so lucky to have coached her.”
St. Rose was also reflective in the minutes after the clock ran out on her Ivy League career. She was sad, but she could put the loss in perspective: Princeton ended the season 26-4, with losses only to Maryland, Columbia (twice) and Oklahoma State. It won the Ivy League regular-season title outright and the Ivy League Tournament. By any measure — even that of a program that won NCAA Tournament games in 2022 and 2023 — it was a thrilling season.
“The fact that we only lost to three teams this whole entire season is incredible,” St. Rose told reporters postgame, her voice steady and confident. “… Since we lost today, it sucks, but just looking back, I’ll always remember how much grit and how much fight we had in each and every single game.”
Arguably no one on the Princeton roster personified that grit and fight more than St. Rose. After tearing her ACL in the fourth game of her junior season, there were no guarantees that she’d look like herself on the court as a senior. But she worked as hard in her rehab process as any player Berube has seen, and she was back in full force by the season opener.
Though Berube tried to be cautious about St. Rose’s workload, she proved to be durable throughout the season. She appeared in 28 of 30 games and averaged a team-best 15.8 points, 4.5 rebounds and 2.2 assists in 31.7 minutes per game.
St. Rose finishes her Princeton career ranked 15th in program history in career points, with 1,215 in just three full seasons. If she’d played four seasons, she’d likely be in the top five. And she’ll graduate with a full house of accolades: first-team All-Ivy this season, second-team All-Ivy as a sophomore and Ivy League Rookie of the Year in 2022-23. (She could add to her hand next season, when she’s expected to play for a power-conference team as a graduate transfer. Graduate students are ineligible to play in the Ivy League.)
St. Rose fit in seamlessly this season with a group of returners who’d had to learn to play without her in 2024-25. That group was young, starting four sophomores, and didn’t win an Ivy League title, but it got an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament. That gave the Tigers invaluable experience heading into this season. Then those sophomores became juniors, and St. Rose’s return elevated them even more.
“We fell short in the Ivy League last year, and we just came in ready,” St. Rose said. “… Everyone improved their skills drastically. I felt like everyone came in confident as well. And I just feel like this whole entire season, that confidence showed.”
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That confidence was crucial because the Tigers had just 11 players on the roster this season, and only 10 were healthy. They were also undersized, with no one taller than 6’2, so Berube revamped the offense to space the court and run in transition. Junior Fadima Tall initially wasn’t happy about moving from power forward to center, but she and all of her teammates bought in, and that helped Princeton squeeze a lot out of a little roster.
Princeton went 12-1 against a nonconference schedule that ranked 51st nationally — easily the toughest slate for an Ivy League team this season. According to a new NCAA metric, about three of those wins would’ve been losses for an average NCAA Tournament bubble team, which is what Princeton was last season.
The Tigers did that largely on the strength of their offense — the opposite of a typical Berube team. Overall this season, they averaged 107.1 points per 100 possessions, which ranked 23rd in the country and was more than 5 points better than last season. They also had a penchant for comebacks, winning six games in which they trailed by at least 9 points and another in which they were down 7 with 25 seconds left.
What made Princeton’s offense so potent was its balance, as Hoyt noted on Friday and again on Saturday. Every starter averaged at least 10 points per game, which made a limited rotation feel deeper.
“We work really hard in practice to get the shots we want,” Tall told reporters on March 13. “It’s all about just reading the defense. … We all have the capability to go off on any given night. So it’s about finding who’s hot, sharing the ball, and then those numbers just appear sometimes.”
“I truly felt like they were the hardest team to prepare for of any team that I’ve seen this season,” Hoyt said postgame.
Princeton also improved defensively after two losses to Columbia in conference play. After the first one, Lions head coach Megan Griffith told The IX Basketball that she’d looked to exploit Princeton’s ball-screen defense and lack of rim protection.
After the second matchup on Feb. 13, Berube said that the Lions had been the tougher team, but also that she knew the Tigers had that toughness in them. After that, Princeton started to play better defense in practice, and Berube saw more grit from her team. On Feb. 13, Princeton ranked just 238th nationally with 92.1 points allowed per 100 possessions. But entering Saturday’s game, it ranked 148th with 88.8.
“I do think our defense [improved],” Berube said on Saturday. “… Especially at the end of the regular season and into the Ivy League Tournament, I was really, really proud of the fight and the grit and the toughness that we played with.”
All season, the Tigers played to their strengths and compensated for their weaknesses well enough to win. Their No. 9 seed in the NCAA Tournament is tied for the second-best seed in Ivy League history, behind the 2014-15 Princeton team that entered the tournament undefeated.
On Saturday, though, the Tigers’ lack of size and defensive miscues were too much to overcome. They hadn’t given up more than 68 points in six previous NCAA Tournament games under Berube but surrendered 82 on Saturday, including 48 in the first half.
Oklahoma State used a steady diet of pick-and-rolls to get junior forward Achol Akot open at the rim in the first half. Princeton got stuck in mismatches or just left Akot wide open, and she finished the game with a career-high 28 points on 12-for-15 shooting. When Princeton double-teamed Akot in the second half, the Cowgirls’ guards knocked down open shots.
Yet the Tigers still put multiple scares in Oklahoma State in the second half. They cut a 15-point halftime lead to 4 with an 11-0 run to start the third quarter, and when Oklahoma State pushed it back to 13, the Tigers had another run in them to pull within 5 points with 8:29 left in the game. They just couldn’t get any closer, as the Oklahoma State defense held them scoreless for more than 4.5 minutes.
“Those kids are winners. They know how to win,” Hoyt said about Princeton. “And that’s why I’m so proud of our team, because we found ways to win against a team that’s very comfortable in those situations.”
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For Princeton, it wasn’t a moral victory by any means. Everyone on the team believed the Tigers could win. But Berube mentioned pride three times in the first minute of her postgame remarks because she’d seen her team stick together, play to its identity even when trailing and do everything it could to win. That’s part of why she’s particularly loved coaching this team, because the bonds between her 11 players are ironclad.
St. Rose and junior guard Skye Belker also held their heads high postgame, speaking with poise and thoughtfulness as they processed the wrenching finality of Saturday’s result.
“I’m really proud of us for … our ability to trust each other in big moments and when we’re up and when we’re down,” Belker told reporters. “In every moment, we trust each other and rely on that.”
“What I’m really gonna miss the most [is] that connectedness, that togetherness, that closeness,” St. Rose said.
So there were no tears from the players at the podium, and Berube’s voice didn’t catch quite like it had when past seasons came screeching to a halt. There wasn’t the frustration from last season, either, when Tall declared she never wanted to feel the sting of losing again. Instead, there was a quiet resolve and a louder excitement for 2026-27, when Belker, Tall and two other starters will be seniors poised to do even bigger things and the roster is expected to swell to 13 players.
The only time tears threatened was when Belker was prompted to talk about the idea of doing that without St. Rose in the lineup alongside her.
“I’m going to miss just her love for the game,” Belker said, pausing mid-sentence. “I think her work ethic is so inspiring, and her love for the game is so contagious. And I’m not going to dive more into it. Otherwise, I’m gonna cry.”
Looking for more March Madness stories? Read all our NCAA Tournament coverage at The IX Sports.
Thank you, Jenn. It better happen next year. After that we’ll have to reload!