Depth of roster key for AWC women
Matadors can get win No. 400 in program history tonight as Cunningham enters year 19
Arizona Western coach Patrick Cunningham enters his 19th year as the women’s basketball coach with a milestone in mind. Cunningham came to AWC from Yavapai in 1999 to be the first head coach. If the Matadors win their seasonopener at home tonight against Tohono O’odham at 5:30 p.m., they will have achieved the program’s 400th win.
“That’s kind of a little milestone for the program, the players, the coaches,” Cunningham said, later adding, “It’s just a lot of players and coaches that have been through the program over the years. It’s been fun for me to kind of watch people work their way through here and move on through life.”
AWC and Cunningham, remarkably, have never had a losing season in school history. Last year, they reached the Region I Finals after a semifinal victory over Eastern Arizona, but lost to Cochise to end their season.
“The big things are you have returning players that were that close to the national tournament,” Cunningham said. “They can let the new people know how difficult it is to get through our league and how every game is very meaningful, when it comes to the conference games.”
Though the Matadors — went 23-9 overall and 18-5 in the conference, finishing second in the regular sea-
son — have six sophomores from last year on the roster, and eight total for the 2017-18 campaign, there will be a lot of holes to fill when it comes to scoring.
Krisynthia Sampson, Maria Marquez and Sharice Kawakami have departed, and Mathilde Diop signed with Colorado after her freshman year. They combined to average 40.7 points per game and each averaged between 21 to 27 in minutes per game, with no other player hitting 18.
In Marquez, AWC loses a sharpshooter who made three 3-pointers per game (41.5 percent from 3). And the two forwards did a bit of everything. Sampson led the team in field goal percentage (49.1), rebounds (seven) and steals (2.4). The 6-foot-2 Diop was first in assists (3.8) and blocks (1.4).
It’s a lot for Cunningham to replace, but he thinks that quantity could win out over high quality in the case of this year’s Matadors.
“We feel like we’re not great at any one spot, but we feel like, collectively, we can be pretty good,” Cunningham said. “We can shoot it, we handle the ball OK, we’ve got inside presence and we’ve got some athleticism. We’re well-balanced, and I think we’re a little deeper and tougher than we we’ve been in the past couple years.”
The inside presence will come from sophomores Destiny Gonzalez and Gloria Mulumba, at 6-foot and 6-foot-1, respectively. Both came off the bench last year, and of the returning players, they are the leaders in points at 5.3 per game.
Cunningham thinks Theyoung Puoy, a transfer from Highline College in Des Moines, Wash., can fill the roll Sampson played last year.
“We feel pretty good on the inside,” Cunningham said.
There are a number of options at guard: sophomores Rey Imamura, Roimata Blackburn, Nicole Smith, and freshmen Aimee Brett and Raven Roberts.
“We don’t know if we’re going to have anybody with huge numbers, but we feel, collectively, we can put up big numbers,” Cunningham said.
Having so many similarly skilled players in the mix for starting and bench spots does create the potential for a good outcome — everyone is competing at this juncture for minutes, and Cunningham wants to see how it plays out in game action.
“We’ve had high competition in practice,” Cunningham said. “We try to get them to understand that it’s not a matter of who’s scoring, as long as we’re scoring. … The minutes are going to be spread out. ‘We want you to go as hard as you can for whatever time period you’re out there,’ and then somebody else is going to go out and give it their best shot.”
An international team
Sports teams at AWC, most notably soccer, basketball and volleyball, have had a handful of international players come through the programs over the years. But this year’s women’s basketball team has an especially high number.
Six of the 14 Matadors come from outside of the U.S., representing four different countries. Imamura and freshman guard Mone Izume are from Japan: Fukuoka and Kumamoto, which are 70 miles apart. Blackburn and her younger sister, Leila, a freshman, both hail from Wanganui, New Zealand. Brett’s hometown is Adelaide, Australia. Mulumba is from Helsinki, Finland.
“It just kind of works out that way,” Cunningham said. “We love the international flair, and we’ve got a great international program here, so we might as well take advantage of it and get kids that can play at a high level.”