Lady Raider Basketball Finishes Regular Season With Momentum
The Lady Raiders had a long and winding road this season, on the way they had successes and failures. The pre-conference season was mostly successes as they tallied a winning record and stacked up some big wins. The conference season was another story often times in the final score and record column but once you look a little deeper you can find some momentum to build on.
First, the Lady Raiders only lose one Senior. Zuri Sanders was huge for the Lady Raiders this year and was second in the Big 12 with 9.8 rebounds per game. It will be a loss for sure but it also means you get the bulk of the roster back in 2019-20.
Secondly, the team this season was full of young stars, including Big 12 Freshman of the year Chrislyn Carr who also landed on the Honorable Mention team and the All-Freshman team.
Other returning stars include Sydney Goodson, who drops dimes like this:
Britney Brewer will also return, a Big 12 Honorable Mention team member in her own right who averaged more than 13 points and 7 boards per game.
It's not just returning talent, that gets you excited for improvement. The team actually was improving. It's hard to see past a 4-14 Big 12 record but take 3 seconds and you can find some positives. The Lady Raiders won just one game through the first half of Big 12 play. In the second half of Big 12 play they won three. The four total Big 12 wins is three more than the team had last year.
Three of the Big 12 losses were by a single possession and only four conference losses were by double digits. For comparison sake, in 2018 the Lady Raiders had 17 double-digit conference losses. Lot's of people don't like moral victories but to be competitive just a year after being so bad, I'll take that any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
As exciting as it would be to just line up the same squad and go again next year, there are reinforcements on the way, including an ESPN Top 100 player in Alexis Tucker and a 5-Star transfer Lexi Gordon coming in from UCONN.
The future is bright for these ladies.