Ohio State women’s UCLA loss a confidence boost for Elsa Lemmilä

Since the start of the 2022-23 NCAA women’s college basketball season, center Lauren Betts grew from a bench player for the Stanford Cardinals to an All-American with the UCLA Bruins. Stack up all the accolades thrown Betts’ way and they may be as tall as the 6-foot-7 big.

On Sunday against Ohio State women’s basketball, Betts had 18 points, 16 rebounds and four assists — a pretty standard stat line for Betts against the Buckeyes.

Ohio State sophomore center Elsa Lemmilä now has three career games against the prolific center Betts. Over that time, Lemmilä learned a thing or two about the big.

“She’s really hard to guard,” Lemmilä told reporters. “She’s very big and very, very physical, and it’s just a matter of getting each possession right. You have to be in the right position, trust your teammates that they’re coming to help you trap. It has to be very exact the way that you guard her.”

Each of those three games ended in losses, including Sunday’s 82-75 defeat, but the most recent edition was different. Lemmilä was not a backup big, like she was in her first matchup in February. Lemmilä was not injured, like she was in the Big Ten Tournament in March.

On Sunday, Lemmilä was the starting center for head coach Kevin McGuff’s Buckeyes after an injury moved the big to a bench role for the last eight games. The big showed Sunday why that may not change anytime soon.

Dive into the statistics from the defeat and Lemmilä’s 13 points is the center’s personal best in a conference game. In the second quarter, Lemmilä picked up three of those from beyond the arc when she broke an 0-for-11 team slump from three-point range in the half. Lemmilä went 5-for-5 from inside the paint and 1-for-2 from deep.

“That’s a huge number for my confidence,” Lemmilä said. “Having a game like this and start off the conference play just really boosts my confidence and puts me in a position that my coaches want me to be in, and they want me to have confidence so that I can play like I did today.”

Lemmilä struggled with confidence and a list of surgeries all needing recovery that took away preparation from both of her NCAA seasons. That low belief in her own abilities was clear in earlier performances this season, but not in the last three games. Especially not against the Bruins.

Defensively, it was the Finnish big’s eighth game with at least four blocks in 33 collegiate appearances and Betts shot 50% from the field, below her season 59.2% season average and 63.3% lifetime average from two-point range.

None of it surprised the people who see Lemmilä every day in practice and around Ohio State’s campus.

“She’s [Lemmilä] always been like that. I don’t know why she hasn’t shown this,” point guard Jaloni Cambridge said about Lemmilä‘s standout performance. “Thankfully she showed it today, but she’s always been like that. We’ve seen that plenty of times, when we keep telling her like she’s a dog and she has to show that every game.”

The Buckeyes needed Lemmilä to have the kind of performance she did Sunday. Whether it was to break a long drought of shooting or give Ohio State at least some presence inside against not only Betts but an experienced UCLA team with size and physicality throughout the roster.

Originally, the game plan was to have both Lemmilä and Kitts on the floor to match some of that size, but foul trouble kept the redshirt freshman Kitts off the court for half of the game. So, Lemmilä had to play 32 minutes, the most she has logged this season and only second to 34 minutes against the Iowa Hawkeyes in February, but five of those came in overtime of that Ohio State victory.

There are areas of improvement for Lemmilä and the center knows it. Lemmilä said she received a good amount of feedback on what she could do better while sitting on the bench, but what Sunday showed were strides in the right direction. A performance of a college sophomore who only started playing the game as a teenager.

A player using her size aggressively inside the paint and growing confident enough to take shots, miss them and keep shooting.