UC San Diego never led in its debut in the NCAA Division I women's basketball tournament in its first season of eligibility, losing to Southern, 68-56, in a First Four game at Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles Wednesday night.
The score was tied once, 2-2, when Tritons sophomore guard Sumayah Sugapong made a jump shot 3 minutes, 40 seconds into the game.
Neither team scored again until Jaguars forward Sky Castro made a layup 1:52 later.
UCSD trailed 19-11 after the first quarter, 40-20 at halftime and 49- 40 after three quarters before a crowd announced at 603.
Sugapong led the Tritons (20-16) with 19 points while guard Parker Montgomery added 15.
Soniyah Reed scored a game-high 24 in 17 minutes off the bench for Southern while Aniya Gourdine added 17 and fellow guard Tionna Lidge 12.
The victory in the matchup third- and fourth-lowest seeded automatic qualifiers advances the Jaguars (21-14) into a first-round game Friday against UCLA, the tournament's overall No. 1 seed.
UCSD qualified for the tournament by winning the Big West Women's Basketball Championship, defeating UC Davis, 75-66, in Saturday's final in Henderson, Nevada, a day after a 51-49 semifinal victory over top-seeded Hawaii, with Sugapong making the tie-breaking layup with 0.2 seconds remaining.
The Tritons tied UC Davis for third in the Big West Conference with 13- 7 records. The teams split their two regular-season meetings, with the road team winning both times.
Under NCAA rules, a program transitioning from Division II to Division I is ineligible to compete in championship events for four seasons. UCSD began its four-year transition from Division II to Division I in the 2020-21 academic year.
"The rationale behind the rule is to allow programs to get up to speed, to build the necessary compliance, facilities, scholarship requirements and other standards to satisfy Division I membership," Meghan Durham Wright, an NCAA associate director of communications, told City News Service.
The rule had been two years but "was doubled when teams began to make the jump and were unable to sustain Division I membership because they made the move too soon and could not keep up financially," Durham Wright wrote in an email.
UCSD was founded in 1960 and began its women's basketball program in the 1971-72 season. It competed on the Division III level from when the NCAA began conducting women's championships in 1981 through the 1999-2000 academic year and on the Division II level from the 2000-01 academic year through the 2019-20 academic year.
