Olaeta’s a gift from Spain for Cal Baptist basketball
It may sound weird, but it actually took a series of failures for Jarrod Olson, California Baptist’s women’s basketball coach, to realize what kind of competitor he had in Ane Olaeta.
It’s easy to see now.
Olaeta, a 5-foot-4 senior guard from GernikaLumo, Spain, was the Western Athletic Conference’s Player of the Year this season. She is averaging 7.9 assists per game, which unofficially leads the nation but is not listed in the official NCAA stats, since she plays for a team still in its four-year transition to Division I. And she leads a CBU team that is 22-0, opens WAC tournament play in Friday’s semifinals in Las Vegas, and is aiming at a WNIT championship (again, because of that pesky transition that leaves the Lancers one year away from eligibility for the big tournament).
It was an exhibition game against UC Riverside early in her freshman year that demonstrated to Olson that she wouldn’t be deterred by failure and was mentally strong enough to handle the transition to a new country, a new language and a new level of basketball.
“Ane, when she was a freshman, was a bit of a ballhog,” Olson recalled. “I mean, she had always been the best player on her team growing up in a small town in Spain, and so she was used to just shooting, but ... she really wasn’t a good 3-point
shooter at all. One of the things I had been really working on with her was just being more comfortable shooting her 3-pointer. She goes 1 of 15 from the 3-point line in that game, and I just remember — she was like 0 for 7 or 1 for 7, but she’d missed a ton in a row, and I just looked at her and said, ‘Don’t you dare stop shooting.’ Most people would have, and she didn’t.
“But I knew after that day that she was going to be a player, because she wasn’t going to shrink from the moment, or she wasn’t going to let failure dictate her end result. And she wasn’t going to lose the confidence, the belief in herself that she would be a great player. I really walked out of that game thinking, ‘Man, we got something good here.’ And I was right.”
The shooter’s mentality is universal: The next one’s always going in. Oleata laughed when that philosophy, and that game, was brought up.
“Oh, my gosh, I remember it,” she said in a Zoom conversation. “I remember shooting the first one. Couldn’t make it. Second one. And he was like, ‘Keep shooting, they’re good shots.’ I was like, OK, and then I kept missing and missing.
“Last year (as a junior) I didn’t want to shoot the ball. I didn’t think I was a good shooter. But this year I think I got better. Coach says open catch-and-shoot threes are good for you, and whenever I have that chance I’m going to take them.”
Hers might not be classic form. Olson compared her shot to Jim Furyk’s golf swing, which looks quirky but is actually consistent. From this untrained eye, it looks more like the tippy-toe push shot Magic Johnson would shoot from beyond the arc. But it works. Olaeta made 34.2 percent of her 3-point tries this season and 35.1 percent in 2019-20, and those catch-and-shoots are a valuable complement to her ability to blow by defenders and drive to the hoop.
Overall she shot 42.3 percent from the field and averaged 12.3 points a game this season.
“She’s worked on (her shot) to the point where it doesn’t matter and she’s good at it,” Olson said.
It all complements her ability to distribute the ball. The listed NCAA leader in assists per game is Syracuse’s Tiana Mangakahia with 7.5 per game, 135 in 18 games. Olaeta had 166 in 21 games for 7.9, and her assistto-turnover ratio of 2.68 (62 turnovers) would have her 17th in the nation if eligible for the NCAA’s official list.
Not bad for a supposed ballhog, eh?
“Once I make the first three, people come at me, so then it (gives) me way more chances to just drive the ball and then make another defender come to me so I can kick it to my teammate,” she said. “I know they’re going to make those shots because we work on them . ... We have too many people that are really good. If you take me out of the game we have Britney Thomas, we have Caitlyn (Harper). We have so many people that can make plays.”
Thomas (13.7), a 6-1 senior from San Jacinto, and Harper (13.5), a 6-1 sophomore from Hartland, Wis., are CBU’s top scorers on a team that averages 77.6 points a game and has four players averaging double figures.
You could also make a case for Georgia Dale, a 5-6 senior from Australia, as an MVP for a different reason. When an 18-year-old Olaeta
arrived on campus, she knew almost no English. Dale, her first roommate, provided some informal but valuable tutoring in the language to go with the first semester ESL course CBU offers for its international students.
“I remember she would teach me a word every day,” Olaeta said. “I didn’t know what ‘sweat’ meant. I was like (pointing to perspiration on her shoulder), ‘OK, how do you say that?’ ... Overall, being with people and just having conversations every day helps.”
She became fluent in English quickly. But there were other adjustments. Olaeta said practices at home in Spain were three days a week, maybe an hour and a half max, and there was no work with weights. “My first year I didn’t like weights at all,” she said.
But Olson said her commitment and determination have been evident from day one, reflected in her work ethic, leadership by example ... and, occasionally, a strong-willed streak.
“She will fight me on stuff, and she is stubborn,” he said. “But it’s kind of what makes her great. She’s 5-4 and probably shouldn’t be that good at basketball, but she’s the kind of person that is just going to find a way, and she has really turned herself into a great player.”
High achievers usually are strong-willed, right?