2005 was one of “those” seasons for the Lady Lions. After the latest blowup, Rene Portland had a small, young roster. The result was her first losing season in her time at PSU. This season, she should reap the benefits from playing such a young team.
Point Guard: Portland has a definite system for her point guards. She recruits one every four years and turns the team over to her. This is certainly not a strategy many coaches use, but it has worked tremendously for Portland. She has won more games than almost any coach around and has produced some of the best point guards around.
She appears to have the next great point guard in Brianna O’Rouke. A point guard is supposed to be a coach on the floor, and O’Rouke mirrors Portland’s personality. She is aggressive and has no problem telling anyone, teammate or referee, when she feels that their performance is lacking. If she doesn’t mature out of the yappiness, she will make few friends but, again like her coach, that may not bother her. She has the physical tools and ballhandling ability to run Portland’s offense. O’Rouke is also a savvy player who understands what should be happening on the court.
Portland’s point guards have not always been good offensive players and O’Rouke certainly wasn’t in her freshman year. While she averaged a decent 7.8 points a game, she shot only 34% overall and 25% from beyond the arc. That isn’t good enough to force teams to take her seriously as a scoring threat. It’s an area that has to be improved if she is to be as good as her other skills would allow.
O’Rouke averaged 34 minutes a game as a freshman and that isn’t likely to go down. There’s no true back-up, but that will only matter if O’Rouke is injured. That is a chronic weakness of Portland’s teams and one she is obviously comfortable with.
Wings: In Portland’s ideal offense, a strong pair of scoring guards compliment the outstanding point guard. She looks to be solid in this area again in 2006. 6’1 wing Kamela Gissendanner stepped right into the starting lineup and had an immediate, significant impact. The transfer from NC State provided athleticism and explosive potential while finishing second on the team in scoring with 14.8 points a game. She also finished second in assists and was a good defender. Her downside was her shooting. She only hit 40% of her shots overall and 26% from three point range.
Junior Adrienne Squire returns as the other guard starter. Squire developed into one of the league’s deadliest three point shooters in 2005. She hit 35% of her over 5 three point shots a game and at times kept the Lady Lions in games with those shots. But she is not a good all-around player. Despite her very good three point percentage, she hit only 37.8% of her shots overall and she is not a good individual defender.
The most intriguing player on the wing will be freshman Tyra Grant. The 2006 Miss Ohio basketball averaged over 30 points a game as a senior and would seem to fit perfectly into Portland’s star based system. She does have somewhat of a reputation as being out of control and that won’t work with Portland. If she does settle down and fit in, she could be the next great Lady Lion.
The other players in the rotation also will have the ability to contribute. Soph Mashea Williams showed flashes of being an impact player before a knee injury cost her a starting job. While not as highly touted as Grant, freshman Meggan Quinn was a good scorer in high school and should be a solid off the bench.
Posts: Rene Portland rightly has earned the reputation as a guard coach. Her team is always guard centered. Despite that, she has had a number of good post players. She has another good one in Amanda Brown. She is a physical, hard-nosed player who led the team with 15.6 points and 7.3 rebounds last year. She also shot almost 60% from the field. When she was on the court, she frequently kept her team in the game. But she wasn’t on the court enough. She is very foul prone. Brown fouled out of seven of the twenty-nine games she played last year. She was limited to 30 minutes a game by her foul problems. Brown will not have her maximum impact unless she learns to keep herself on the court.
The other three returning posts all had a fairly minimal impact. Charity Renfro got most of the starts next to Brown, but she only averaged 3.1 points in over 25 minutes a game. She was the team’s number two rebounder with almost five a game, but she wasn’t effective enough offensively to take some of the defensive pressure off Brown.
Two freshman played sparingly for the Lady Lions last year. Neither Courtney Molinaro nor Rashida Mark showed enough to indicate that they will ever be more than bench players.
Meredith Monroe, a 6’2 center, will be added to the team this year. She will likely spend the season as Brown’s backup and she likely will not make a significant contribution this year.
Summary: The 2006 Lady Lions will be a guard-oriented team with a relatively short bench. They will have decent post play but the stars will be in the backcourt. The team will be hungry and have more than a bit of attitude after enduring a losing season. In short, this is the type of team that Rene Portland likes. And that is never good news for the rest of the Big 10.
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