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Tip-off time

Hoosiers hopeful, Bruins must fill holes

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Sports Illustrated For Women's Trisha Blackmar spotlights the players and programs worth keeping an eye on in the upcoming women's college basketball season. Click here for SI For Women's Top 20 rankings and in-depth team previews.

Key Players

LaToya Thomas, Mississippi State
As a freshman last season the 6-foot-2 power forward averaged 21.0 points and 7.3 rebounds per game en route to earning All-SEC and first team All-America honors. She had a scary moment over the summer, though, when her right arm and finger were grazed by a bullet while she was playing hoops with her brother in a Starkville, Miss. park. Fully recovered, Thomas is poised to have another strong year. Mississippi State coach Sharon Fanning has contemplated moving her to the perimeter on occasion this season to take advantage of her shooting range and playmaking abilities. Thomas will be a marked woman, and how she handles the extra attention will determine whether the Lady Bulldogs remain a dangerous team in the SEC.

Kelly Schumacher, Connecticut
The 6-foot-5 center made her presence known last March when she blocked a Final Four - record nine shots against Tennessee in the NCAA title game. She continued to dominate over the summer as the leading rebounder (7.3 per game) of the gold-medal-winning U.S. team participating in the Jones Cup in Taipei. As a senior this season, her defensive skills and leadership will be crucial in UConn's bid to repeat as national champion.

Teams on the rise

USC
Watch out for the Women of Troy. In addition to returning three starters and a core of athletic players, USC adds 6-foot-2 forward Ebony Hoffman and 6-foot-4 center Portia Mitchell to this year's roster. Hoffman was named the country's best post player for 1999-00 in USA Today, and USC coach Chris Gobrecht says, "Ebony has the best power-quickness game I've ever seen." Mitchell, Hoffman's teammate at Narbonne high school in Los Angeles, is coming off a redshirt year during which she raised her level of conditioning. Both will be key to Gobrecht's effort to restore Southern Cal to its former glory.

Indiana
A new era is underway in Bloomington and not just because Bobby Knight will no longer be lurking around Assembly Hall. Kathi Bennett, fresh off a successful rebuilding project at the University of Evansville, takes over for longtime Indiana women's coach Jim Izard . Also, this year marked the first time the school's men's and women's hoops squads took the floor together during Midnight Madness. Junior guard Heather Cassady stole the show, beating junior forward-center Kirk Haston in a three-point shooting contest, 17-12. Nine letter-winners return from last season's 10-18 squad -- including junior Jill Chapman, ablossoming WNBA prospect -- and Indiana has every reason to be optimistic. The transformation won't happen overnight, but it seems Indiana is poised to climb out of the Big Ten cellar and earn its first NCAA tournament bid since 1994-95.

Teams in trouble

UCLA
Six seniors graduated, including forward Maylana Martin and point guard Erica Gomez, who formed the nucleus of a Bruins squad that had gone 64-28 over the past three seasons. UCLA coach Kathy Olivier was counting on guards LaCresha Flanigan, Michelle Greco and Nicole Kaczmarski to take charge of the program. However, Olivier announced last month that Kaczmarski, who started all 29 games (11.7 ppg) as a freshman, was taking the first quarter off to remain home in New York to receive additional medical care for a foot injury she sustained this summer during trials for the U.S. Jones Cup team. She will miss at least seven games as will Flanigan, a senior who was declared academically ineligible for the fall quarter and must reapply to the university for reinstatement. That leaves Greco, a junior point guard, to run a team with many new faces, but no blue-chip recruits. It could be a long year in Los Angeles.

Xavier
With four starters back from last season's 26-5 team and renewed cohesion from a successful bonding trip to Finland, Xavier was thought to be a solid Top 25 team and a dark horse candidate to make the Sweet 16 this year. The Musketeers were looking forward to opening their season at the new 10,250 seat Cintas center up until early October when the injury bug bit two starters and a key reserve unexpectedly departed the program. First, junior guard Katie Griggs was advised by school doctors to stop playing basketball because the degenerative lumbar disk disease she's battled her entire career had worsened. Then point guard Amy Waugh, the Atlantic 10 rookie of the year last season, suffered a complete rupture of her Achilles tendon during a conditioning drill. Finally, freshman guard Allison Lipinski left school for personal reasons just after practice started. The Musketeers remain a favorite to win the Atlantic10 championship with top players Nicole Levandusky (13.5 ppg, 3.2 steals per game), Jennifer Phillips (13.3 ppg, 6.3 rebounds per game) and Taru Tuukkanen (14.9 ppg, 7.0 rpg), but the future doesn't look quite as bright as it once did.

If I had to pick the Sweet 16 today:

Connecticut, Tennessee, Notre Dame, Duke, Georgia, Purdue, Louisiana Tech, Rutgers, Louisiana State, Texas Tech, Old Dominion, Stanford, Oklahoma, Iowa State, Mississippi State, USC

Trisha Blackmar's Inside Women's College Basketball column appears every Friday on CNNSI.com.

 

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