VANCOUVER — They may be just three games into a new season, yet Simon Fraser head coach Bruce Langford does not hesitate when asked to describe the 2024-25 edition of Red Leafs women’s basketball team.
“I think we play a more exciting style than we have played for many years,” Langford began this past Sunday after winning two of three games at the team’s own Canadian Tip-Off Classic at the Langley Events Centre.
It’s the perfect way for the veteran head coach, who is entering his 24th season on the job atop Burnaby Mountain, to talk about his program’s substantial off-season shift in scheme… and attitude.
“I’ve never been a fan of pressing, but we’ve pressed every second at practice and every second of games,” began Langford, who this past Sunday had his team within seven points in the fourth quarter of an eventual 66-51 setback to Florida’s Tampa Spartans, who came into the three-day challenge at the LEC ranked No. 4 in all of women’s NCAA division. 2 basketball.
“We’re not very good at it yet… we’re OK at it,” continued Langford, whose unranked team opened play Friday with a 78-62 win over the St. Edward’s Hilltoppers of Austin, TX, then kept form Saturday with a 77-67 win over the Dominican Penguins of San Rafael, CA. “There’s some pieces we saw this weekend that are very hopeful.”
With departures of Jessica Wisotzki (16.8 ppg), Gemma Cutler (7.4 rpg) and Grace Killins (66 threes-32.5 %) from last season’s 17-14 team (10-8 GNAC) which lost in the opening round of the conference tournament, the Red Leafs were not only looking to replace a trio which supplied more than 50 per cent of its scoring and 40 per cent of its 200 combined player-minutes per game from a season ago, but perhaps more importantly find a new style of play to best suit it overall strengths.
Thus this past weekend head coach Langford, and assistants Marie-Line Petit and Jordan Webb were forced to look a little more outside the box. Gone were:
*Wisotzki, the 6-foot-2 senior who capped her SFU career as one of the most dangerous and versatile guard/forwards in program history.
*Cutler, the 6-foot-3 post who was as true and established a rim protector as there was in the D2 ranks last season. She elected to transfer to Div. 1 UC Riverside.
*Killins, the high-volume, high-results three-point shooter who could be counted on for her production whether starting or coming off the bench as the sixth player.
There’s still a month and six more non-conference games before the Red Leafs open GNAC play Dec. 5 at home to Seattle Pacific, beginning with another pair of non-conference foes from California this Friday (Vanguard) and Saturday (Westmont) at Simon Fraser’s West Gym. Both games tip off at 3:15 p.m. GNAC foe Montana State-Billings is also taking part, playing 1 p.m games Friday (Westmont) and Saturday (Vanguard).
Yet the early results do more than suggest that Simon Fraser has picked the right style of play from which to begin carving a new identity.
With the likes of returning team scoring leader Sophia Wisotzki, as well as fellow holdovers like Lainey Shelvey, Rachel Loukes, Arman Dulai, and freshman Sophie Bergeron among others bringing athleticism and the required buy-in to make the change work, the Red Leafs collected some very impressive opening weekend numbers in the both forcing turnovers, and turning them into points.
How impressive?
They turned St. Edwards over 33 times, Dominican 28 times, and then forced No. 4 nationally-ranked Tampa into 25 more turnovers.
Collective, they outscored their three foes by a whopping 88-42 in points-off-turnovers.
Bergeron, the 5-foot-9 freshman guard from Saguenay, Que., and the same CEGEP De Sainte Foy program which Langford recruited current assistant coach Petit from as a player back in 2010, was hard to miss over the weekend.
With unbridled athleticism and energy, and both the mental and physical tools to excel as an aggressive defensive presence, she is in need only of a refinement of technique and the know-how of when to ease the throttle of her non-stop on-court motor.
“In Quebec, they all said that she had three lungs,” said Langford of the fact that Bergeron seemed to possess an uncommon stamina on the court. “I said to (coach) Petit ‘What is ‘lung’ in French, and she said ‘poumon’ so I said that’s what we’re going to call her. She blew away the beep test (in training camp). So I said ‘That’s her name’. She loves it. I think she loves it. She loves it.”
Ask any coach the keys to a successful press, and among the most mentioned trait is a completely unflappable belief that what you are doing defensively will work.
And as it pertains to pressing and trapping the opposition point guard, Langford said that he has been very happy with the way Shelvey, Bergeron and Loukes have gone about that particular assignment.
So when was the last time SFU women’s basketball, in Langford’s near-quarter century of head coaching, been a press-first team?
“Never,” he said. “We’ve never pressed full court for any extended period of time. There have been token times when we’ve pressed when we’re in trouble. But I never believed that you could do it three days in a row at nationals so why would you do it as a thing?”
Obviously there is a time and a place for everything.
Now, I’ll open up the rest of my notebook from the weekend:
THE WONDERS OF WISOTZKI
What can you say about the way Sophia Wisotzki opened her senior season at the Div. 2 Challenge?
All the 5-foot-10 guard did was average 26.3 points per game, literally blowing by any defender who tried to defend her off the dribble.
“Listen she is a stud… no way around it,” said Tampa head coach Tom Jessee after Wisotzki led an SFU uprising which cut the Spartans’ lead from 18 to just nine in the third quarter with her blend of havoc created off the dribble-drive.
“She’s as good as anybody that you’re going to see because she can score at all three levels, she’s a great defensive player, she rebounds the ball. But also, she reads things so well. If you do the wrong thing defensively, like we jumped under a couple of screens and she hits a couple of threes. She rejected a screen and got to the basket. Not only is she a great player, she’s got a great IQ and so my hat’s off to her. She is a tough cover for anybody and if there is anybody in this conference that is better, I don’t want to play against them.”
TOUGHNESS AND TALENT
Makenna Gardner isn’t sitting at the top of the SFU scoring charts after three games, but the senior guard has started things off looking like she could be one of those kinds of players who can set a barometre of her team’s toughness on a game-to-game basis.
Heading into Friday’s game against Vanguard, the 5-foot-9 Gardner leads the team in rebounds (5.7 rpg) and total offensive boards (8).
It’s a small sample size, but she is also first in assists (8) and blocks (3). And, she is second in minutes played (31.7 MPG) and steals (3.0 spg) trailing only Wisotzki (35.0, 3.3) in both categories.
FRONT COURT FUTURES
With Cutler’s transfer to UC-Riverside, the Red Leafs’ front court roster is full of opportunity this season, and there’s a quartet of players — 6-foot-1 Rilyn Quirke, 6-foot Kaitlin Tetteh-Wayoe, 6-foot-1 Sahnya Gill and 5-foot-11 Sophia Morton — all in the process of showing what they can bring to the trenches.
Quirke and Tetteh-Wayoe, each back for their sophomore seasons, are the most proven in terms of their performance, yet it seems clear that, as game-to-game match-ups dictate, the post position is going to be most successful as a committee.
And to that end, it was impressive to see the pure freshman Morton, out of Burnaby Central, come in and play a huge 20 minutes of defence Sunday against Tampa’s bruising 6-foot-1 senior post Zoe Piller, who could have done even more damage than her 30 points and 12 rebounds in 35 minutes of court time if not for the attention Morton paid to denying her entry touches.
“Morton came here to redshirt, and she was probably the best against (Tampa’s) big kid,” Langford said of her job on Piller, one which gives the group a boost of depth it may not have been counting on this season. “She came in as fit as could be. She had the beep test results of a perimetre player. Right now she is a little limited offensively, but she had a nice bucket today, too.”
