Women's Hoops Blog

Inane commentary on a game that deserves far better


Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Dang, but SI.com is good at hiding their stuff on women's basketball. They wouldn't do that on purpose, now, would they?

Dumb luck takes me to a piece by Kelli Anderson on Wyoming's Hanna Zavecz. (I have a soft spot for Wyoming, because of their fabulous WNIT run last season.)
"I believe Hanna will go down as the best player in Wyoming history," says fifth-year coach Joe Legerski, who signed Zavecz, his first international player, without ever having seen her play, even on videotape. (He brought her over on the recommendation of a club coach in Australia.) "She's a tremendous offensive player and has a great understanding of the game."
Anderson writes about the influx of Aussies (including Patty Mills of St. Mary's) in a second piece:
Ever since Andrew Bogut, a 7-footer out of Melbourne, was named college basketball's 2005 national player of the year as a sophomore at Utah and went No. 1 in that June's NBA draft, America, of all places, has become the destination of choice for many of Australia's best young hoops talents.
Still waiting for the Liberty to get their (healthy) Aussie....sigh.

Tracy Schultz has a couple of pieces on the site, too. Her weekly power rankings and an article on mighty-mite Oklahoma State's Andrea Riley.
Tagging along with dad as he coached his AAU team, Andrea Riley was just a toddler when she first stepped onto a basketball court. Twenty years later, his words still stick with her.

"He told me, 'I know you want to play, but you're a little small,'" Riley said. "I've worked hard because I don't want to be the person that's too small to play. I didn't want to be the player that everyone pushed out because I was too small."