WSU Women's Basketball Website
The Cougs are sick and tired of being the doormat of the PAC12 women's basketball conference! Come to Maples at 7PM on Friday the 3rd and watch this new stronger better edition of the Washington State Cougars take on the Stanford Cardinal.
It's tough to recruit five star players to the Palouse, WSU has had two barely winning seasons in the last twenty-two years and in 2018, they were 10 and 20. So if you're the Athletic Director, how do you turn the program around? First, you hire a great coach who knows how to win. Kamie Ethridge was the point guard at Texas when her team went 34-0 and won the national championship. She won a gold medal in the '88 Olympics, was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame, and is generally thought to be one of the greatest players in history. Her last Head Coaching gig was at Northern Colorado where the Bears were 83-44 in her four year stint and 26 - 7 in her last year, including a Big Sky Championship and a trip to the NCAA Tournament.
Kamie was hired by WSU at the end of the 2018 season. You could feel the difference she brought almost immediately. She's one of the great teachers of the game and she's building a program on a foundation of solid fundamentals. She plays up-tempo and says they'll shoot a lot from distance. When Kamie's hire was announced, she got a letter from Bobbie Buckets (Borislava Hristova, First Team All PAC12 last season) signed by the seven players who decided to stay after the 2018 season, in which she said, ". . . we believe in you, and we are committed to making this thing work."
She's the latest in a series of great coaching hires by PAC12 women's basketball programs - including Scott Rueck, Kelly Graves, Jody Wynn, Adia Barnes and Mark Trakh. You can sense our conference getting stronger every year. Kamie will bring the Cougs to a new level. Soon, they will no longer be an assumed "W" on any schedule - including ours.
The Cougars feature players from every corner of the earth - Australia, New Zealand, France, Hawaii, Israel, Serbia, Bulgaria, Rwanda and Nebraska. Borislava is one of the best NCAA players in America - by way of Varna, Bulgaria. If she's on on Friday night, she'll put on a show in Maples. She can light it up.
Obviously, I'm excited for the long-suffering WSU fans and expect a dramatic turnaround in Pullman in the near future.
I'll be up in Corvallis watching the Beavs take on visiting Utah, but will have my I-phone locked into the Cardinal-WSU game. Agree with you on WSU's exciting brand of basketball and the international flavor, but hope the game is not close.
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