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In looking at the box scores it appears that a couple of the team members from the first semester are no longer with us. Also, I assume the hot-shot junior college recruit from Chicago never became eligible.

Can someone elaborate on this subject?

Good questions. When I was watching on Saturday, I noticed that the Boone ( I think that is her name) was not in the gym...

Maybe someone else can shed some light on the disappearance of players.

She is the one I was referring to, in addition to the JUCO hot-shot from Chicago who never played.

Who knows...I sure don't. I all realized is that we only have 1 senior on the team Richards, but next year we will be full of seniors (Williams, Randle, Dobbins, and Oden)!!

as far as I know they are gone off the team, unless someone has some other information out there.

Boone and Reddick couldn't hack it, and there were eligibility/transcript issues with Reynolds. It's too bad about Reynolds. If you have her then you're looking at a bench that consists of Renita, Sample, Greer and either Reynolds or one of the current starters. That's a quality rotation.

Boone and Reddick haven't been around in quite some time, but I don't think anybody really cares.

That is some brilliant recruiting.

Heck yeah it is. Any time you can bring in a 6-foot-3 widebody and a supposed big-time difference-making guard, you do it. I'd say the recruiting there was pretty darn good.

The aftermath ... not so great, but it happens.

Played what, three games between them?

With the limited numbers you have in basketball mistakes in recruiting, not necessarily mistakes in judging talent, can be very costly.

Unfortunately, it happens to all programs. It is part of the game.

Burly Bear

Well, it's a lot easier to call it after the fact. Recruiting isn't an exact science, and things happen like that all over the country.

But while some people want to see Jamie Boone and Theresa Reynolds, others prefer to look at Lauren Williams, Mariesha Piggee, Allyson Sample, Brittany Greer and Tiffany Moore. And there's Katie Nicholson too – although she's redshirting this year.

I don't know for sure if Reddick was even a scholarship player, so I wouldn't chalk that up as some big recruiting error. With Reynolds, who's to say it wasn't a deal where she was such an exceptional talent you take a risk on her knowing there's a chance she might not make it, but the reward potential is so high you can't pass it up?

You know you've got a good team without her, but if you can get her in, then you've got a great one. You enter it with the mindset she might never play, but if she does then it's a huge bonus.

There's a big difference in football and basketball, too. You don't have to have a lot of depth in basketball to be successful. Heck, look at least year's Sugar Bears team. They had seven or eight players for most of the season.

1. Renita Dobbins
2. Carone Harris
3. Caronica Randle
4. Micaela Thomas
5. Victoria Richards
6. Traci Graham
7. Shamille Taylor
8. Alicia Kellogg

and that's it. Eight players. And I think Renita missed some time in there, too, leaving them with seven players for a stretch. That team did okay.

You don't have to be great 1-12 in basketball. You can afford a bust or two as long as it's not the people you were really depending upon to be the centerpiece of your team.

However, you were counting on these two pretty heavily.

We have had such a good history of our women's team keeping their grades, etc that it is just hard to see two such glaring "situations" in the same year.

And I disagree to a certain extent that you can afford errors in basketball. In fact, just the opposite is true as you have so few scholarships.

In football, especially now with 63 scholarships, you can take a flyer on an exceptional talent who might be a risk.

Just my opinion.

I believe you will see this become more glaring as we begin playing a D-I schedule in the future. I hope I am wrong.

You do have a small number of scholarships in basketball ... but so does everybody else. You can roll high risk-high reward with a great player or take the sure bet with a marginal player. One way you've either got a stud or an empty seat on the end of the bench, the other way you've got a full seat on the end of the bench.

Basketball teams typically don't utilize all their players every game, or in many games, really. If you miss on one or two players, you better have the studs in your heavy rotation to make up for it. If you do, it's not that big a deal. You just have fewer bodies on the bench. That's basically the deal with the Sugar Bears.

I still don't think those two were going to be counted on heavily. I could be wrong, but that's just the way I see it.

With Reynolds, it was like laying down a bet on a game, or buying some raffle/lotto tickets or whatever. You know you're going to fork out some cash, and in return you might hit it big, but you know there's also a good possibility you might take a hit ... so, you only do it within your means. Like an average person might only lay down $200 on the Super Bowl since it's within his means, or buy just $15 of lottery tickets a week, whatever ... the Sugar Bears took one big scholarship risk. If they hit, awesome. If they miss, well, it didn't break 'em. You go into it not counting on that money/player, and while it'd sure be nice to get it, you aren't banking on it.

With Boone, I think as the year progressed you would've seen her factor into the equation only sparingly had she stuck around. What she was, was a big body to come in, bang, and give you some versatility in that you could have a legitimate inside scoring threat and somebody who could eat up the boards. But for the most part, the Sugar Bears like to get up and down the floor and frequently run their bigs on the perimeter (Oden and Richards are both solid outside shooters), which frees up the inside for quick guards like Dobbins and Williams to penetrate and make things happen, or for somebody versatile like Caronica to either drive and score/get fouled or take her defender down low where Caronica usually has the advantage.

Boone would've clogged that up. Oden is molasses compared to the rest of 'em, but she still gives you that inside/outside threat so she's plenty useful. Still yet, she plays about seven minutes less per game than Victoria, who is much more fleet afoot. The quicker Brittany Greer gets more minutes than Oden. That's just the way the Sugar Bears like to roll -- speed. Boone would've been useful in spot duty for particular things, but she wasn't going to be a key contributor.

But regardless, I don't see how anybody can blame coaches and their ability to recruit when a player gets part of the way into a season and just doesn't want to do it anymore. How is a coach supposed to know that? It's a lot easier to judge talent than it is to judge personality, heart, and want-to. Nobody, not even licensed professional psychologists, can accurately predict/project what is going on in a person's head and how they're going to react in every situation. You can't expect a coach to. There's got to be some responsibility on the player there. It's not a coach's fault that a player doesn't want to put in work, buy into things, and help the team.

Yes, you'd rather have them on the team but it's not the end of the world and cause for wailing that they are not. It happens just about everywhere. This is not something unique to UCA, and it hasn't really been detrimental to the team, so I'm not real concerned with it.

Excellent argument above.

I would just like to add that I was just wondering what happened and was in no way trying to place blame on anyone.

I did not intend for my post to sound vicious.

However, I did question the signings in the beginning.

I did not mean that I do not like the team we have, I just wish we had those scholarships back.

Guess we will have them next year.