The Aggies are headed to Pullman, WA this Thursday to take on the Washington State Cougars in the Sweet 16 of the WNIT. The Cougars have taken an interesting path to get to this point of the post season. Despite their record and the fact that they lost in their quarter final match-up of the Pac-12 Tournament, they auto-qualified to the WNIT due to the fact that all of the teams ranked higher than them in the Pac-12 qualified either automatically or at large for the NCAA Tournament. In the WNIT, they have wins over BYU (72-64) and Wyoming (68-67 OT). RPI rankings indicate that this should be UCD's easiest game of the tourney so far and WSU's most difficult, but it's March so rankings basically get thrown out the window.
Washington State has an incredibly diverse roster. They have players from the US, Australia, France, Macedonia, Portugal, Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria. That is pretty incredible, actually.
We're seeing more and more of these international rosters in basketball particularly and in many college sports in general. For example, Saint Mary's annually mines the best men players from Australia, the CSU women's basketball team was largely from Scandinavia and some of the powerful SoCal water polo teams are essentially made up of the best players from Eastern Europe.
It's must be costly to actively recruit in foreign countries but it seems to be a very effective way to build competitive teams at the D1 level. I wonder if we'll ever see the Aggies, in any sports, begin this kind of recruiting?
We have a little bit of international influence on our teams. Dani Nefekh is from Ontario, Canada. Incoming freshman, Sage Stobbart, is also from Canada. A couple years ago we had Idit Oryon from Israel. On the men's side we have Moneke from Australia, and Funtarov is from Bulgaria. Over the last couple years we have had Iggy Nujic from Australia, Olivier-Paul Betu from Montreal, and Ivan Nikolic from England (although none of them really panned out at all).
A lot of these player weren't necessarily recruited internationally though, they played for JC's or other colleges and transferred. I agree that especially for basketball there is a lot of international talent.
Taking a quick look at their schedule, WSU's record may not be great, but they beat #9 UCLA by 9 and Oregon by 16. Both are women's NCAA Sweet 16 teams.
Bee has doubled their coverage of the women's participation in the WNIT. This morning they have, again in the fine print, a listing of tomorrow's games and at the end is UCD at WSU.
They also devote about two column inches to a bit on the local minor league soccer team having to cancel a match.
Looks like tonight's game will be streamed through the Pac-12 Network, but you have to have a valid cable provider that includes access to the Pac-12 channel... so it looks like I'll be living with the radio or stat tracker, unless I can find a cough cough less than legal method of watching it.
WSU takes a technical, we miss both FTs, get the rebound, shoot a 3 and miss, then WSU gets the ball and sinks a 3... that's what type of game this is...
Tough out, but gotta give it to this team. Very resilient, wouldn't give up. Tough place to play. I wonder if the result would be different if it were an aggie home game. WSU was big and athletic. In any case, hats off to the ladies on another solid season.
Congratulations. Three games into a national tournament, all on the road, all against bigger programs. Traveling to the Palouse during finals week, coming back strong and fighting to the end. ....Lots to be proud of. Great future for this team.