‘Full circle’: How Lewis and Clark grad Jacinta Buckley found her way back home and lead Eastern Washington to NCAAs

Growing up in Spokane, Jacinta Buckley was all-in on Lewis and Clark High School, and she can readily rattle off some of the many star girls basketball players – names like Briann January, Katelan Redmon and Hayley Hendricksen – who helped build and sustain the Tigers’ legacy.

As a basketball player, Buckley has also long been aware of the significance of reaching the NCAA Tournament, something she helped the Eastern Washington women do this week for the first time since 1987.

But not until a few minutes before Sunday’s tournament selection show had the EWU senior noticed that this week she will be the one being watched by students and families in the LC community – a community of which she is still an active part.

“I hadn’t even thought about that. That is full circle,” Buckley said Sunday. “That’s pretty cool.”

The Eagles are enjoying the program’s best season . They’ve won 29 games (and lost just five). They secured the Big Sky Conference’s regular-season and tournament titles.

A significant reason for their success has been the play of Buckley, another LC graduate to find success at the next level.

“I feel like that means we’re the best team to come through Eastern Washington,” EWU junior and LC grad Andie Zylak said of the program’s 29 wins and counting. “To say that I’ve been a part of that is crazy.”

At 5 p.m. Friday, the Eagles will play in Corvallis as the No. 14 seed against the four-team pod’s host, the No. 3 Oregon State Beavers, with a chance to do something else the program has never done: win an NCAA Tournament game.

“I know we are all so proud of how far we’ve come and what we’ve accomplished,” Buckley said, “but we’re definitely still hungry.”

Teammates in high school, Buckley and Zylak joined EWU during the same recruiting period, but Buckley did so after playing two years at UNLV, from 2019 to 2021.

She played in 28 games as a freshman and 24 as a sophomore. During the two years she averaged 9 minutes and 2.1 points per game.

“I was under the impression at that age that I’ve been in Spokane for so long, I’ve got to get out (and ask), ‘What does the rest of the world look like?’ ” Buckley said. “And I did that. I went to UNLV. I think that was about as different as you could get, and I really liked my time there.”

But then, Buckley said, she realized that she could still have a college experience and also be close to home by playing in Cheney.

If only it were that simple.

As she prepared to transfer, Buckley had conversations with Wendy Schuller, who was then – and had been since 2001 – Eastern’s head coach. Buckley was ready to join the Eagles.

But then she got a call from an assistant coach sharing the news that the EWU staff had been fired, and so she started talking with Seattle University’s Skip Gleason.

“I was really dreading (the portal) because out of high school the recruiting process was a struggle for me,” Buckley said. “It was so overwhelming. And then (to be in) the portal again, I knew I just wanted to get it over with quickly.”

It wasn’t long before Gleason told Buckley that the Gleasons were leaving Seattle, which at first seemed like another letdown for Buckley. But when he added that they were heading to EWU – and that Joddie Gleason, EWU’s new head coach, wanted Buckley to play for the Eagles – that was something else.

“That,” Buckley said, “was music to my ears.”

Buckley made an immediate impact. During the 2021-22 season, she averaged a career-high 12.9 points and 8.5 rebounds per game while playing a team-high average of 31.1 minutes. With significant roster turnover, the Eagles finished 9-21 overall and 7-13 in the Big Sky that year.

But they improved the next season, finishing 19-11 (11-7) with a similar rotation of players, joined by transfer point guard Jamie Loera.

All the while, Buckley was able to see her family more regularly, joining in on barbecues, family dinners and sporting events for her cousins.

It was the community that had supported her when she was playing at LC; now she got to reciprocate.

“(At UNLV) it was cool to know that I could be independent,” Buckley said, “but you can do that here, too.”

This season, Buckley has averaged fewer minutes (28), points (9.8) and rebounds (6.1) than in her two previous years at Eastern, partly because she missed nine games with a concussion.

The Eagles lost the first two of those games, their only Big Sky losses. But they recovered, and since then they are riding a 13-game winning streak into the tournament, in no small part due to what Buckley has done lately.

In the six games since her return, Buckley has ramped back up to playing starter minutes again, and her three games in the Big Sky Tournament were arguably her best of the season, when she scored 46 points, grabbed 25 rebounds and had five steals.

“She was confident. She was locked in,” Zylak said of Buckley. “Nothing anyone said, no pressure that was on her, was going to affect the way she was playing. You knew that we were going to win the game because Jacinta Buckley was locked in.”

Now the Eagles are reaping the benefits of having adapted to playing without Buckley for nine games – and then getting her back at the most crucial stretch of the season.

“We knew as a staff how important she was to us making a run through the (Big Sky) tournament,” Gleason said. “She’s a difference maker. She can score at every level, and she can guard everyone.”

Having celebrated a regular-season title and a conference championship, Buckley said she’s eager to get that feeling again as the Eagles prepare for the Beavers.

“I want that confetti,” Buckley said. “I am starting to learn that I absolutely love it.”

One more win would give the Eagles 30 on the season, a rare feat for almost any program. But the satisfaction of playing on – when any game could be her last at Eastern – is fueling Buckley to want more.

“Just getting (to the tournament), you could say it’s enough,” Buckley said. “But to win – starting with one game at a time – would be even better.”