Alanna Smith’s shooting gives Stanford a shot in the arm in NCAA Tournament

Alanna Smith’s 13.7-point average seems modest. Then you look at her in the home stretch of Stanford’s season, and she’s standing even bigger than her height — which is “193 centimetres” (or 6-foot-4) in her home country of Australia.

Her Cardinal will be underdogs when they face top-seeded Louisville in the Lexington Regional semifinals Friday night. Lexington, Ky., is just an 80-minute drive from the Louisville campus, so the crowd will be heavily in the Cardinals’ favor against the Cardinal.

But Stanford faced a similar situation last year when it faced top-seeded Notre Dame, also in Lexington.