The women’s basketball team headed to the national championship this past month ending the season with an overall record of 22-2 and bringing home second place in the national championship.
(Ben Conrad) “I’m really a big believer in setting goals that are more process oriented. You know, approach our practice and our preparation and our film and everything we do a certain way. Do all of our work a certain way all of those things are controllable and then we feel like the results at the end will happen if you follow the process.”
(Conrad) “I believe that when you make a final four it sort of validates your year a little bit. You won two games at the national tournament, you’re in the national semifinal playing on Friday night, you’re one game away from the national championship game so getting to the final four is really really hard.”
The Cavs had an outstanding roster awarding Presley Barton and Gabby Fuller all conference second team, LaJahda Boyland and Jaylen Townsend first team with Townsend also receiving the all-conference MVP award.
(Conrad) “You don’t get those things unless you win if you don’t win the league if you’re not in the top of the league a lot of the times you’re not going to get those awards and the recognition. So, all of those awards we all got was because the team had tremendous success.”
(Conrad) “You know, again, the better the player the easier it is to utilize them, but we knew going in really early that Jaylen Townsend and LaJahda Boyland were going to be really special sophomores, their kids that played a lot as freshman, they got a lot of experience, they’re both really solid people that we knew were going to get better, and they did.”
(Conrad) “Presley Barton she was a transfer kid she was a kid we knew I recruited her out of high school before she went to Hutch and then she transferred here. I knew she had a chance to have a really good year and she did she didn’t disappoint at all. Gabby Fuller made a huge jump from year one to year two Didi Collier same thing so really it was just a matter of having some experienced kids that had played a lot as freshmen, it all kind of came together just right for the second year.”
Coach Conrad was also awarded KJCCC all conference coach of the year and had this to say about the season.
(Conrad) “The thing that I emphasize with our kids and our staff, and this is every year to be honest with you, but I really really try to get our people to just control the controllable’s. There’s certain things we have control over and then there’s certain things we don’t and I think that’s good, just good practice for life.”
(Conrad) “My philosophy about basketball, what do we control and once we know what that is we really attack. We feel like we really control how we defend we feel like we control how we rebound we feel like we control how we transition so those are things that we spend a lot of time at.”
Reporting from The Campus Ledger, this has been Paige Winters.