As The American enters its final season with the best-known team in the game, USF leads a strong contingent of teams that will battle for the top of the conference
by Dick Weiss for TheAmerican.org
It is hard to describe the magnitude of what UConn’s women’s basketball program has accomplished since shifting from the Big East to the American Athletic Conference. The Huskies, who won four straight NCAA championships from 2013-16 during the Breanna Stewart era and have been a regular in the Final Four, are a perfect 102-0 in conference play with six straight American titles.
The Huskies will wave goodbye to the conference at the end of this season, heading back to the Big East and opening the door for someone else to become the dominant force in what promises to be a suddenly fluid league.
This will be a chance for USF and coach Jose Fernandez to finally take center stage.
“We played for the conference championship four of the five years,’’ Fernandez said. “Now, it’s going to hurt when UConn leaves, just from a standpoint of respect and teams in the tournament. We’ve just got to do our part, schedule properly in the nonleague in November and December and win. If you don’t schedule properly there’s no way that you’re going to get at large bids to the tournament. It’s going to come back to the coaches.’’
Fernandez, who is entering his 20th season at USF, has won 354 career games, including six 20-win seasons in the last seven years. He is the winningest coach in program history. The Bulls have been to the NCAA tournament six times, including five times in the last seven years as well as nine trips to the WNIT, winning that tournament in 2009.
Fernandez has created a buzz around his program with his resourceful international recruiting. Ten players on the Bulls’ roster are from overseas.
“Once we left the Big East and joined The American, we had to recruit schools from the so-called Football 5, and it was getting tough getting into the front door to get those guys,” said Fernandez. “So we figured, ‘We got to get creative. So, we went international. If you get the best kids from Spain, Portugal, Latvia, they’re a blue-chip recruit here.
We’ve become almost a household name in Europe. We turn down more kids now. A lot of it is because the success they have had.”
The formula worked — until last season. The Bulls were picked 17th in the preseason, started the year with an impressive win at Ohio State, then added two more impact nonleague victories over Oklahoma and ULCA before their season crumbled under a mountain of misfortune.
Three of their top four players went down. Senior guards KItija Laska of Latvia, a two-time All AAC selection and an All- America candidate who was averaging 16.3 points suffered a season ending injury as did 6-3 sophomore Beatriz Jordao of Pombal, Portugal, who averaged 11.3 points. 5.7 rebounds and 1.9 blocked shots. Redshirt senior guard Laura Ferreira from Lisbon, Portugal, who was averaging 14.9 points, was also out with an illness.
“None of the five players who started our first game played a minute in the conference tournament,” said Fernandez.
“Nothing prepares you for it, but I couldn’t be prouder of our kids who weren’t expected to play and still produced. When opportunity knocked, those guys were ready. This year’s group contains a lot of those kids who cobbled together 19 wins. It was different for them. They had been to the NCAA tournament five of the last six years. This year’s team includes three different groups. The guys who were hurt and are coming back, those who played, and five freshmen and a junior college player.’’
Fernandez managed to regroup and salvage the season, getting strong contributions from 5-9 redshirt junior guard Enna Pehadzic from Horsens, Denmark, and 5-10 freshman guard Sydni Harvey from Nashville to win 19 games and advance to the second round of the WNIT.
Pehadzic, a per-season second team All-AAC selection, emerged to average 15.4 points in the American, scoring a career high 35 points against ECU and making the All-AAC tournament team when the Bulls advanced to the semifinals. Harvey, who was named to the AAC all-freshman team, averaged 11.7 points and poured in a career high 25 points against Tulane in January.
This year, the Bulls should be back to normal. Fernandez has six players who are six feet or taller, including three established post players — 6-1 senior Tamara Henshaw, who averaged 6.5 points and led the team with 8.1 rebounds; 6-2 junior center Shae Leverett, who averaged 7.4 points,7.5 rebounds and Jordao, who averaged 11.3 points, 5.7 rebounds and 1.9 blocks in 12 games before going down.
There is also sophomore point guard Elisa Pinzan, who led the Bulls in assists as a freshman and played for the Italian national youth team that won the European U20 championship this summer and was one of six Bulls underclassmen who represented their countries in international competition.
Fernandez is notorious for challenging his teams. The Bulls will play three top seeds from last year’s NCAA tournament — Baylor Notre Dame and Mississippi State, plus perennial national contender UConn in a home and home; and four more teams, including AAC rival UCF -- that advanced to the NCAA tournament.