BURNABY — Simon Fraser’s Sophia Wisotzki is more used to making the news every time she brings her dynamic two-way game to the court this season for the Red Leafs’ basketball team.
On Wednesday night, however, she had the news delivered to her.
“Oh, I didn’t know that,” the 6-foot senior guard and kinesiology major admitted when asked to chat about her sizzling 26.4 points-per-game scoring average, one which had her sitting at No. 2 overall across all of NCAA Division 2 basketball.
Emilee Weakley of Maryland’s Frostburg State is tops at 29.1 ppg, while Wisotzki’s GNAC rival Sunny Huerta of Central Washington is fifth at 22.2 ppg.
With the Red Leafs set to play a pair of key West Region non-conference games at home Friday and Saturday, we’ll start out with a couple of items here today in extended notebook form before finishing with a look at how Wisotzki’s eight-season journey from high school through university has impacted the player she has become today.
EVERY GAME IS A BIG GAME
This weekend’s Red Leafs Women’s Basketball Classic, which begins with an early tip-off on Friday at the West Gym, carries a lot of importance for the four teams taking part.
And that’s especially true for the home team as Simon Fraser is looking to put the finishing touches on a non-conference schedule that could potentially be one of the very best of the program’s NCAA-era history.
Simon Fraser (6-1) will face the Concordia Golden Eagles (1-4) of Irvine (CA) in an 11 a.m. tip. At 1:30 p.m., the Red Leafs’ GNAC rivals, the Northwest Nazarene Nighthawks (4-2) of Nampa (ID) tip off against San Diego’s Point Loma Nazarene Sea Lions (3-3).
On Saturday, Concordia and Northwest Nazarene face each other at 11 a.m., with Simon Fraser meeting Point Loma Nazarene at 1:30 p.m.
The importance of the weekend?
March’s 64-team NCAA national tournament features not only its 23 conference champions, but also 41 at-large invitees.
SFU’s goal, as is the goal of every team, is to win their conference title and gain an automatic berth, but failing that, one of those at-large berths, based on a number of factors, including in-region winning percentage, and in-region RPI, will do just fine.
To that end, SFU is presently tied for the best West Region record at 5-0 along with GNAC pre-season favourite Montana State-Billings and Cal-State Dominguez Hills of the California Collegiate Athletic Association (CCAA).
The Red Leafs are also sixth in West Region RPI, its .605 rating tops among GNAC schools.
“It puts more emphasis on the need to show up and be ready to play,” said Wisotzki of the weekend games against Concordia and Point Loma. “And I think it’s also great when we can show that in our home gym. This week our team has put an emphasis on working hard because we know how important these games are and because of what our volleyball team did in the preseason. We really took that into consideration and it’s fuelling us.”
The Red Leafs volleyball team was announced in the national championship field of 64 as a No. 8 seed in the West Region Dec. 5-7 in Pomona (CA) despite losing its final three GNAC matches. It’s saving grace wound up being a preseason filled with quality performances, including a 3-0 victory over then-No. 16 Cal State-San Bernadino.
Stepping back onto the basketball court, here’s a little clearer idea of what is at stake.
At the end of the day, after the West Region — consisting of the GNAC, CCAA and PacWest Conference (PWC) — sends its three conference champions to nationals, a total of five at-large bids will be up for grabs between teams from the same three conferences.
The perfect example of what a great West Region preseason can mean?
In 2016-17, SFU went 15-5 in the GNAC but lost its opening-round game aIts GNAC championship tournament 58-57 to Central Washington.
They, were, however, 8-0 in the preseason, including a perfect 4-0 in the West.
That’s why having a great performances Friday and Saturday could do wonders come March Madness time.
THE POWER OF THE PRESS
Earlier this season, as it opened play as the host of its own NCAA Division 2 Challenge event at the Langley Events Centre, it was hard not to talk about the fact that the Red Leafs had made the switch on defence to that of a full four-quarter pressing team.
Just under a month later, SFU is sitting with a 6-1 record with two more non-conference games to go before it opens GNAC play at home Dec. 5 to Seattle Pacific.
It’s the fastest start for the team since 2016-17 when it opened 8-1, and by mid-January was sitting at 16-2 en route to the program’s second Sweet 16 national tournament finish.
None of this is an attempt to make direct comparisons with one of best teams the program has produced this century.
Instead, it’s more a way to focus on the resourceful ways in which a new style of play was implemented in the face of the roster’s evolution from 2023-24.
“Last season when ‘Wiz (senior Jessica Wisotzki) and Gemma (Cutler) got hurt, we lost 6-2 and 6-3,” related head coach Bruce Langford of the height and length his team no longer had at its disposal..
So Langford had no choice but to go smaller and younger, and thus quicker with the likes of Arman Dulai, Lainey Shelvey, Sophia Wisotki and Rachel Loukes.
“We started to get after it, and we started to have success with pressing,” the coach continued.
At season’s end, Jessica Wisotzki graduated from the program, while Cutler entered the transfer portal and wound up at Div. 1 UC-Riverside.
“We’d significantly changed, we lost the length we had in the quarter-court defensively and I didn’t see us having success if we didn’t change the pace.”
And so the $1,000,000 question has to be: Just how effective has the pressing scheme been for the Red Leafs?
Last season, over its 31 games played, the Red Leafs managed to force 20 or more turnovers by their opposition nine times and went just 3-6 in those games.
This season, over its first seven games, SFU has managed to force 20-or-more turnovers in every game en route to its aforementioned 6-1 mark. SFU’s first game of the season was a 78-62 win over Dallas Baptist in which the Red Leafs forced what remains a season-high 33 turnovers.
It’s easy to be foiled by small sample sizes, but maybe not.
The key takeaway from our comparison game?
Last season, SFU pressed when it was in a pickle, trying to stop opposition runs or make a late-game rally.
This season, it’s just what they do, and all the time.
“I’m really happy,” said Langford. “The effort’s there, the ‘get after loose balls’ is there… the hustle pieces. We just have to improve our decision-making a little bit.”
DEFENCE IS STILL IN HER HEART
It is interesting to remember back to the 2018 B.C. senior girls basketball championships.
Langley’s Walnut Grove Gators came up short in the Quad-A title game against a powerful Kelowna Owls outfit, yet for fans of the team playing in its hometown that night, there was a certain Grade 9 guard named Sophia Wisotzki who pretty hard to miss.
And not for reasons you’d normally remember such a young underclassmen playing a starring role on the province’s highest stage.
That night, it was not only how the future Simon Fraser star scored 16 points, including a three that pulled her team to within four over the final five minutes of play, it was the thirst and anticipation she brought to her play on the other side of the ball.
That’s why, as the same Wisotzki is these days tearing up the NCAA Division 2 ranks on offence with her aforementioned 22.9 ppg average, it’s fun to bring up the team’s newly-adopted 40-minute press and ask her about how things have, in a way, come full circle.
“Honestly, I’ve really enjoyed it because coming into SFU, I was more of a defensive threat I think, so I have always had that pressing mindset in me,” she explains, her defensive reputation built on the backs of back-to-back Top Defensive Player awards in both her Grade 9, and her Grade 10 seasons with the Gators.
But the question has to be asked: Did Sophia Wisotzki initially gravitate to the defensive area of the floor in her early high school years because of the enormous offensive flair possessed by two of the team’s other players in her own sister Jessica Wisotzki, as well as the dynamic Tavia Rowell?
“I think it was a bit of both,” Sophia Wisotzki explains. “Between Tavia and my sister, I don’t think we needed another scorer. We needed someone else to stop the other teams’ leading scorers. With my speed and competitiveness, I was able to do that.”
Now, heading into this weekend’s games, Sophia trails her sister Jessica by 405 points, a mark that will be hard to reach, but one that is not out of the question.
If, say, Sophia Wisotzki manages to maintain her current pace of 26.4 ppg, she would catch her sister’s career total of 1,444 points in 15 games, or more precisely somewhere around the team’s Feb. 8 game on the road against Central Washington.
No season, however, unfolds on such cues.
With the onset of GNAC play comes a ramp up in defensive intensity. As well, the growing base of talent surrounding Wisotzki has begun to reveal several candidates who seem ready to step up their own offensive games.
Either way, her head coach is energized by her desire to keep adding layers to her game, increasing her efficiency and putting no limits on her final ceiling.
“(Sophia) is a joy to work with,” Red Leafs’ head coach Bruce Langford said. “She’s shown real growth as a player. In the past, she often demonstrated frustration with her adversity when it came to her. Now, she’s receptive to coaching, trying to improve on her weaknesses to better utilize her own strengths.”
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