Georgia Tech earnestly needs to put its palm on the reset button.
“I think it’s a good way to look at it because that’s basically what it really is for everybody,” Tech coach Nell Fortner said. “It’s been a long season, a long conference season, so everybody has a new, fresh start. We’re definitely approaching it that way.”
Fortner’s team opens ACC tournament play at 1:30 p.m. Thursday at First Horizon Coliseum in Greensboro, North Carolina. It needs to win four games in four days to bring a championship back to Atlanta, but stringing wins together has been a tall task recently for the Yellow Jackets.
Tech (21-9) is on a four-game losing streak and hasn’t won consecutive games since the start of February during a three-game win streak. The Jackets go into the postseason reeling from losses to North Carolina State and Florida State, respectively, at home and then back-to-back defeats first at California and then at Stanford.
“(At Stanford) we competed really hard, we just didn’t make stops when we had to make stops. We scored 82 points, and we hadn’t scored 82 points in a while,” Fortner said, adding that freshman guard Dani Carnegie, who missed Sunday’s game at Stanford with injury, is day-to-day. “When we started the season out, we were scoring big points. But we’re dealing with some injuries, and we’ve gotta have players stepping up.”
To Fortner’s point, her team was one of the darlings at the start of the 2024-25 season. Tech won 15 in a row to begin the season and scored 83.1 points per game during that stretch.
But Virginia Tech, whom fate would have it is Georgia Tech’s opponent Thursday, upended the Jackets 105-94 in two overtimes Jan. 9. That was part of nine losses in 15 games to end the regular season for the Jackets.
Tech dropped all the way down to ninth place in the ACC over the final month of the season. If it does happen to end its losing streak and beat the Hokies (18-11) on Thursday, it would face No. 1 North Carolina State at 1:30 p.m. Friday.
“They’re very dynamic to score the basketball,” Virginia Tech coach Megan Duffy said about the Jackets. “They have a mix of some veterans, and they have two freshmen who are pretty good. They just have this firepower to be able to go downhill, they can shoot the ball. They have people that can just cause havoc with their hands and their movement patterns. And I’m sure they’ve be hungry to get another crack at us.”
Regardless of how Thursday’s matchup (or the rest of the ACC tournament) plays out, Georgia Tech should be a lock to return to the NCAA Tournament starting later this month. The Jackets have a NET ranking of 29 and went 7-9 in games against Quad 1 and Quad 2 opponents. Fortner’s team also took care of business against lesser opponents by going 14-0 against Quad 3 and Quad 4 teams.
Both ESPN and On3 predict the Jackets to be a No. 9 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Virginia Tech, meanwhile, is squarely on the so-called bubble and goes into the week considered one of the first four teams outside of the tourney field. The Hokies’ win over Georgia Tech in January was one of the highlights of their season.
“It was probably the first game that I felt, with our team specifically, we started believing a little bit more. We started believing that we could beat anybody potentially in our league,” Duffy said. “That was the confidence in each other, the balanced scoring, which we had been talking about a lot through the year, but that was our first test to really get it done against a ranked team and a Georgia Tech team that was, at the time, undefeated. Just the opportunity to come in, on the road, and get a big quality win was huge.”
The Jackets go into the ACC tournament looking for their first tournament title in program history. Tech has appeared in the championship only twice, in 1992 and 2012, and lost both times. Fortner is 4-5 at Tech in ACC tournament games.
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