UNC women’s basketball loses at ACC Tournament as Louisville moves to final

Now the North Carolina Tar Heels will have to wait.

No. 16 North Carolina women’s basketball team entered the ACC Tournament hovering around the cut line for a top-four seed in the NCAA Tournament and thus the right to host the first-and-second rounds, but bowed out in the ACC semifinals with a 65-57 loss to No. 12 Louisville.

“Hats off to Louisville,” UNC head coach Courtney Banghart said. “They get a chance to play for an ACC championship, clearly a spot we would’ve liked to have. But we didn’t play well enough to earn it, quite honestly. We had just too many breakdowns and didn’t quite have enough execution, which is uncharacteristic of us.”

Saturday’s missed opportunity to bolster the hosting resume fell apart in the second half despite a promising progression to the game.

North Carolina (26-7) fell behind by nine in the early going, but recovered well to carry momentum into the second half. Banghart’s team scored seven of the final nine points of the first half to trim the deficit to a point, spurred on by five Nyla Brooks points in her best stretch of the afternoon.

It even carried into the second half as the Tar Heels took their first lead since the opening minutes on a Indya Nivar layup before trading it back and forth for most of the remainder of the period.

But the bottom fell out quickly, and Louisville (27-6) took advantage.

A 10-second violation while North Carolina had a 38-37 lead started the avalanche, energizing the Louisville bench after its own third quarter lull. Imari Berry canned a triple immediately after the turnover, and the Cardinals were off to the races on a 13-2 run.

“Nothing was easy,” Nivar said. “They play really aggressive defense and even though we broke the first line of defense, they had really big bigs on the second line. I just felt like we weren’t getting into our rhythm and flow a lot. We usually kick out for 3s a lot, and just didn’t get into that today.”

Berry’s go-ahead 3-ball was one of instances of her slicing the Tar Heels all day, as the ACC 6th Player of the Year scored 22 points on 9-of-14 shooting, including three consecutive jumpers late in the fourth quarter to help put the game out of reach.

Elina Aarnisalo, Lanie Grant and Nyla Brooks and Indya Nivar all scored in double-figures, but there was not enough offensive firepower as a whole on a day the Tar Heels just 6-of-22 from 3-point range and only got six total points from the remainder of the roster outside the top four.

The loss extends North Carolina’s drought since its last ACC Tournament title game appearance to 13 tournaments with its last one coming in 2013, while Louisville is into the title game for the fifth time since joining the conference in the 2014-15 season.

Now for the Tar Heels, the question is if they’ve done enough to stay home when the NCAA Tournament commences March 20-21 on campus sites.

“We’ve won 12 out of our last 14,” Banghart said. “We’ve had a lot of Quad 1 wins in that stretch, we scheduled, so we’ve kind of done everything the committee’s asked us to do. I don’t think there’s a team that if you look from now, February and January that’s playing better.”

North Carolina entered Saturday’s action 19th in the NET rankings, and now stand with a 4-6 record against Quad 1 opponents and a 9-1 clip in Quad 2 games. The Tar Heels were not listed as a projected host when the selection committee released its updated list of top-16 seeds on March 1.

“Carmichael’s a great place to host an NCAA Tournament game,” Banghart said. “We know that, we’ve done that well, we’ve sold that place out. If the committee does their job, I feel very confident.”

Louisville will battle another of the ACC’s Tobacco Road squads in Sunday’s championship game against Duke in a 1 p.m. tip-off on ESPN.

This story was originally published March 7, 2026 at 4:50 PM.