June 2010 Stanford Women's Basketball Archives

Sigh. When does college basketball start up again? We here at C and R are counting the days, as we are going through basketball withdrawal. Here is a little fix to help tied you through. There is a summer pro-am basketball league in San Francisco at Kezar Pavilion featuring the Stanford rookies, to give them more playing experience. Games are on the weekends and starts the 19^th of this month. Best of all, games are free. You can see the Stanford stars and future stars….the tentative line up includes old timers Sarah Boothe and Mikaela Ruef, along with soon to be Stanford players Chiney Ogwumike, Sara James and Toni Kokenis. (Well, Chiney will join after her stint with the National Team).

C and R just checked out all the rosters and saw there are a lot of Cal and former Cal players, too. Former Cal standouts Alexis Gray Lawson is back in the Bay Area, as well as Ashley Walker and Devanei Hampton. And hey, Courtney and Ashley Paris are back together on the same team. It is a shame Courtney, with all her blocks and rebounding records in college couldn’t catch on in the WNBA. 

Let’s hope the Stanford players get good experience for the fall! When basketball season will finally start.

Hey, vote for your favorite WNBA all stars! Well, it is a little different this year. Coach of the National Team, Geno Auriemma, wants some quality games for the USA National Team, so since the All Star game is being held in Connecticut, where he is the UConn coach, he worked out a sweet little deal. Have the Team USA players play the WNBA ALL Star players. See the best US stars play each other. Trouble is, most Team USA players would normally be on the all star roster. Fans vote for 10 of their favorite players, regardless of league or position, the top ten players go, and if the players were all ready selected for Team USA, they play there. C and R are a little confused. What if 8 of the 10 players are Team USA players? Would it then by 8 on 2? (okay, C and R read something about the coaches making the other picks to round out the teams.) 

Well, go here to register; you have to give email address and stuff, but if you are like C and R, you have that one fake one you use that collects all the spam. (ummm spam sushi…arrrrgh—okay that was our Homer Simpson imitation). Plus this vote is one that you can do every day. Just think if we ran our government elections like this!

And this just in, former Stanford player Jayne Appel is one of the top vote getters! It’s weird, she had a great four-year career as a collegian with Stanford and her WNBA debut has been limited by a stress fracture and sprained ankle, so she’s not tearing up the WNBA like, say, Tina Charles, the former UConn player and current WNBA rookie who IS tearing it up. Yet Jayne was highly prized by Geno for Team USA, picking only Tina Charles and Jayne Appel for his centers this spring. Well, we would love a healthy Jayne Appel to be on the National Team and get all that free training and coaching, too. 

P.S.
Congrats to Chiney Ogwumike for making the 12 member roster for the USA U18 National Basketball Team. She will compete in the 2010 FIBA Americas U18 Championship June 23-27 in Colorado and is hanging out there for the early part of the summer. As C and R said, she gets free training, conditioning and coaching with the best staff and teammates our country has to offer. Plus, get used to the Colorado air, as Stanford will start playing Colorado in college basketball in 2012.

First it was going to be the PAC-16, a big super conference split in two, have a football championship like the SEC, make more revenue. Therefore the PAC-10 was wooing football powerhouses Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and Oklahoma State. In preparation for this, the PAC-10 got Colorado to join. What? Why? Then all the others said no. It’s just like when you invite a group of the “cool” kids to your party and they all say sure, and then the cool kids drop out but their nerdy cousin says they can still make it, what time and they will bring scrabble. (Sorry, C and R have been reverting back to high school metaphors because we are watching waaaay too much “Glee”) 

Now the PAC-10 is stuck being called the uncool PAC-11 (just like the New Directions Glee Club), so they will probably ask little ol’ Utah to join so they can be the PAC-12 and still have their football championship. (Utah is pretending all innocence, saying no one has contacted them). If that happens, Utah joins, then this will add unnecessary travel to the West Coast schools at a time when budgets are being cut and some sports are in danger of losing all funding. 

And why did the PAC-10 start this shake up (or shake down)? Money. They were hoping to draw those big Texas schools and get their football bowl money to split amongst the schools. USA Today follows and explains the money trail nicely.

We here at C and R think the big schools never had any intention on leaving, but were just using the offer to get a better deal from their current league, kinda like when an employee tells his boss he has another job offer somewhere else, and all of a sudden the boss is throwing all kinds of incentives to get the employee to stay. (hence the shake down reference). But we’re just sayin’… nothing official or on the record here.

And that's what you missed on "Glee", we mean "As the PAC-10 Turns".
Stay tuned….

Congratulations to soon-to-be a-Stanford-player Chiney Ogwumike for making it to the 16 member roster for the USA National U18 Basketball Team. Now she has to survive getting whittled down to 12 members on June 14th. Those 12 will play in the 2010 FIBA Americas U18 Championship for Women, June 23-27. But hey, like C and R said before, she is getting free coaching and great experience.

Colorado bolted to the PAC-10, and more teams might be a-coming. First change since 1978. Hate to be the scheduler of basketball games right about now, although now C and R are being told they won't start until 2012.

Congratulations to UCLA for wining the Softball College World Series, beating Arizona two games to none. (We like they get to play the best two out of three, maybe basketball could adopt that!) In the last game UCLA won it 15-9 and the game featured a record seven home runs, including a grand slam. The 24 total runs were also a World Series record. Love the offense, and love ESPN for showing a lot of games. C and R got to watch a great1-0 pitchers duel earlier in the tournament, but who doesn’t love the long ball! And hey, C and R certainly liked the all PAC-10 final. In fact, if you look at the top 20, seven schools are from the PAC-10, if C and R are counting correctly (or can count that high). 

Now that you are getting over your sunburn, have put away the beach toys, and digested all that red meat, let’s look back at some of the highlights for women’s sports over the Memorial Day Weekend.

Baseball hats off to Eri Yoshida, for becoming the first woman to pitch professionally in the United States in over a decade this Memorial Day Weekend. Ah, if you thought I was going to say “first women to pitch in men’s pro ball ever”, than you obviously forgot about Ila Borders.

Borders was the first woman pitcher to start a men's NCAA or NAIA college baseball game, and became one of the first female pitcher in integrated men's professional baseball (female players such as Toni Stone had performed in the Negro Leagues).

Back to Yoshida, she emulates her hero Tim Wakefield and has a sidearm knuckler that got her to the pros. The 5-foot-1, 115-pound Yoshida is also the first woman to play professionally in two countries, having pitched last year in an independent league in Japan. She even got a hit in her debut!

Also this weekend was the Indy 500 car race, and we got to hear the starters say, “Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines!” Yes, you probably guessed correctly that Danica Patrick was in the field, but it was a record setting day with four, count them four, women starting the race. And, two drove faster than our beloved Danica in the qualifying laps. And oh, they were rookies, Ana Beatriz and Simona De Silvestro! Sarah Fisher rounded out the quartet, qualifying behind Patrick.

So how did the women do? Danica got 5th place, no make that 6th. She finished fifth, than an hour later got bounced to sixth because she just a little tiny bit illegally passed under a caution flag. Well, so did two other cars, so there! De Silvestro finished 14th, Beatriz 21st and Fisher finished 26th after hitting the wall on lap 125.

On to basketball news: Before the weekend stated, Stanford recruits Chiney Ogwumike and Sara James were invited to the Women’s U18 National Team Trials. We wish them luck and are happy they are getting what amounts to high quality off-season coaching and training. Hee. Hee, we are already a leg or four up on (Cal) our competition.

Rounding out our weekend, well, June 1st, C’s favorite Stanford player of all time, Candice Wiggins, played her first WNBA game of the season after knee surgery. Candice had eight points, two steals and made two threes in the 15 1/2 minutes that she played.

Oh, remember when C and R mentioned that Jayne Appel played in her first WNBA games this weekend? Several fans pointed out that C and R forgot to mention she got 5 rebounds in her second game, an important statistic and contribution she made to her team. C and R have always maintained that while Jayne may not be a great scorer day in and day out in the WNBA, she can contribute in other ways, most notable assists and rebounds. You go Jayne, and thanks to eagle-eyed fans.