2009–10 NCAA Division I women's basketball season
The 2009–10 NCAA Division I women's basketball season began in November 2009 and ended with the 2010 NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Tournament's championship game on April 6, 2010 at the Alamodome in San Antonio. The tournament opened with the first and second rounds on Thursday through Sunday, March 18–21, 2010. Regional games were played on Thursday through Sunday, March 28–31, 2010, with the Final Four played on Sunday and Tuesday, April 4 and 6, 2010. The Connecticut Huskies successfully defended their national title from the previous season, defeating  Stanford 53–47 in the final. This was the Huskies' second consecutive unbeaten championship season, unprecedented since the NCAA began to organize women's basketball in the 1981–82 season. Preseason. Preseason WNIT. Ohio State headlines a field of 16-teams for the 2009 Preseason Women's National Invitation Tournament. The field includes 11 teams that played in the postseason last spring: Arkansas-Little Rock, Bowling Green, Florida Gulf Coast, Georgia Tech, Marist, New Mexico, North Carolina A&T, Ohio State, Oklahoma State, West Virginia, and Winthrop. They will be joined in the Preseason WNIT field by Chicago State, Eastern Illinois, Northern Colorado , Towson, and UTEP. The Preseason WNIT features a three-game guarantee format. The event opens Friday, November 13 with first-round games. Second-round games will be played November 15 and 16. The semifinals will be on November 18 and 19. The championship is set for Sunday, November 22. Teams that lose in the first two rounds will play consolation games on the second weekend, November 20–22. All games are hosted by participating schools, and sites are announced by the end of the preceding round. In last year's Preseason WNIT, North Carolina defeated Oklahoma 80-79. Regular season. Conference  winners and tournaments. Thirty athletic conferences each end their regular seasons with a single-elimination tournament. The teams in each conference that win their regular season title are given the number one seed in each tournament, with tiebreakers applied if more than one team tops the season standings. In the table below, if teams tied for the regular-season title, the first team listed won the tiebreaker for top seed in the tournament. The winners of these tournaments receive automatic invitations to the 2010 NCAA Women's Division I Basketball Tournament. The Ivy League does not have a conference tournament , instead giving their automatic invitation to their regular-season champion. The Great West Conference began play in 2009–10 and does not receive an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. Post-Season Tournaments. Women's Basketball Invitational. This season saw the debut of a third national postseason tournament in the Women's Basketball Invitational, a 16-team affair with all games played on home courts. The inaugural title was won by Appalachian State, who came back from a 19-point deficit to defeat Memphis 79–71 in the final held on the Mountaineers' home floor in Boone, North Carolina. 2009–10 NCAA Division