Kentucky Women Play Their Own Winning Brand of Basketball AMES, Iowa - Cathy Krieger arrived at Hilton Coliseum here last Monday primed to yell and stomp her feet for her beloved Kentucky Wildcats. So did her mother, grandmother and aunt, all in Kentucky T-shirts, as well as two daughters of a neighbor. All eagerly shook the blue-and-white pompoms passed out by Kentucky's cheerleaders. Had this been an N.C.A.A. men's basketball tournament game, the Krieger group would have been engulfed by thousands of similarly attired fans, demanding nothing less than another national championship. But the men were not playing here, and Ashley Judd was nowhere in sight. About 50 Kentucky fans, mostly parents of players, turned out in a crowd of 3,254 to support the Wildcats in their second-round N.C.A.A. women's tournament game. They fidgeted as the team committed 34 turnovers and squandered a 17-point lead before outlasting relentless Wisconsin-Green Bay, 65-62, to advance to the Round of 16 for the second time in three years. "It's probably an 11-hour drive from Lexington," said Krieger, a former Kentucky player who lives in Jefferson, Iowa, explaining the dearth of support for the Wildcats here. The men played in Louisville. That's a 75-mile drive compared to 700, or 750. The women's team is taking baby steps in the shadow of the seven-time N.C.A.A. champion men's program. The women have never played in a Final Four, never earned a No. 1 seed, and went 30 years before winning a Southeastern Conference regular-season title this season - a drawback of sharing a conference with Tennessee. But they have a connection to the Volunteers. Kentucky's fifth-year coach, Matthew Mitchell, a former Eagle Scout from Louisville, Miss., began his career as a Tennessee graduate assistant under Pat Summitt. And the Wildcats have qualified for three consecutive N.C.A.A. tournaments for the first time. Kentucky, a No. 2 seed, faces 11th-seeded Gonzaga (28-5) in the Kingston, R.I., regional semifinals on Sunday. The Wildcats (27-6) win with quickness, 3-point shooting and a maniacal full-court defense that churns out turnovers. Kentucky leads Division I in turnovers forced (911) and turnover margin (+9.73 per game). Four times this season, it generated 30 turnovers or more; the Wildcats had at least 20 in all but four games. Mitchell calls the defensive pressure "40 minutes of dread," a takeoff on the former Arkansas coach Nolan Richardson's "40 minutes of hell." Mitchell introduced the defense in 2009-10, his third season, and it propelled the Wildcats to a 28-8 record and the N.C.A.A. Round of 8, matching the team's deepest postseason run. Kentucky went 17-17 and 16-16 in his first two seasons. "We needed to do it out of necessity, out of survival," Mitchell said in the hallway outside the Kentucky locker room last Monday. We were picked 11th in our league in preseason. We had a lot of fast, athletic kids. We didn't have a lot of tall kids. We had to speed the game up and make our calling card defense. It's just really grown from that 2010 Elite Eight team. Those kids were tough enough and willing enough to create a style of play that we can recruit to. Now kids want to come and be part of that. The senior point guard Amber Smith said: "We just try to make people uncomfortable. We try to pressure them, try to deny. Coach told us starting off the season, "We want to be the most dreaded, toughest team." That all just starts with defense, and everything flows from that. Kentucky still lacks height. Four of the five starters are 5 feet 10 inches or shorter, including the conference player of the year, A'dia Mathies, and the freshman of the year, Bria Goss. The top reserve, Keyla Snowden, is 5-7. Yet Kentucky went 7-2 against ranked teams in the regular season - the losses on the road to Notre Dame and Tennessee - and 12-5 against teams in the N.C.A.A. tournament field. Kentucky ranked as high as sixth in the Associated Press poll before settling to 12th. "They're athletic and they're able to pressure you," Wisconsin-Green Bay forward Sarah Eichler said. Then when you drive, they're able to recover and get right back in front of you and contest your shot. You think you're so wide open, and then you end up fading away from the basket instead of going up for the shot like you should have. The victory over the 10th-ranked Phoenix was Kentucky's fourth against a top-10 team and the first outside Lexington, where it beat Louisville and Duke back-to-back in December and Tennessee in a 61-60 thriller in January. The Lady Vols routed the Wildcats by 37 points in the rematch in Knoxville, where Kentucky has not won since 1985. Folks in Lexington are noticing. Kentucky drew a program-best 113,068 to 18 games, with a team-record 14,508 attending the Duke game at Rupp Arena. The Wildcats usually play at the smaller Memorial Coliseum. Their average attendance, 6,282, was down slightly from last season's record 6,364 and ranked 13th in the country. The women's road following is not as grand as the men's. "I think that's definitely possible, and something that we can aspire to," Mitchell said. You need to continue to win games and bring the program to a championship level. I coached at the University of Tennessee for a year, and they had that kind of following, but it's because you build excellence over time. Those kind of things don't happen overnight. But the passion for basketball exists in our commonwealth. When you tap into that and give them something excellent to root for, they'll show up.