Happy to be here? Yeah, but not satisfied

IOWA CITY - California, here they come.

And they say they're not coming just to show up, pick up their parting gifts and go home.

"We've come this far to what? Fail? That's just not going to work," said Kachine Alexander. "We've come so far. Why not keep going?"

The Iowa Hawkeyes board a charter flight for San Jose Thursday afternoon in preparation for Saturday's NCAA women's basketball tournament first-round game against Rutgers.

Tipoff is 7:16 p.m. (Iowa time) at Maples Pavilion in Stanford, Calif. The game will be televised by ESPN2.

Happy to be here? Sure. But not satisfied.

"We want to go as far as we can," said Jaime Printy, the Big Ten freshman of the year. "One win would be great. To beat the No. 1 seed (Stanford, in the second round), that would be even better."

Iowa (19-13) has ridden a late-season wave, winning 11 of its last 14 games. Now, the Hawkeyes have an opportunity to do something they haven't done since 2002 - advance past the first round.

"I'd love to win that first game," said Iowa Coach Lisa Bluder. "But we're not going to judge this season completely on one game.

"If you'd said a couple months ago that we'd be where we are, it would have raised some eyebrows. It feels good in the manner in which we did it."

Rutgers (19-14) closed with a strong run, winning a season-high four straight games before bowing to West Virginia in the Big East Conference semifinals.

The Scarlet Knights endured a pair of three-game losing streaks in Big East play under Coach C. Vivian Stringer, who coached at Iowa from 1983 to 1995.

"We've been up and down," Stringer said. "It's like we're all dressed up for the prom, then the next minute, your date, your team, changes its mind."