8 Sports and Clubs ANDREW BAILEY EDITOR IN CHIEF/SPORTS EDITOR After a season in which they bested every team in the Nation to take home the gold medals, UNBC’s women’s basketball team is in murky water. The departures of T-Wolf megathletes Jaclyn Nazar- eno and Laurel Wallace have cast a dark cloud over the fate of this season, Re- gardless, UNBC Women’s coach Loralyn Murdoch is unfazed and states, with con- tagious confidence: “I think were going to pleasantly surprise some people this year. We had those girls in this program for five years and now there's an opportun- ity for some other girls to step in and bring their leadership and their strengths to the plate and they’re all pretty excited and ready to go.” Thanks to some extremely effective re- cruiting during the summer, Murdoch is confident that this year’s T-Wolves will be able to make a run at the playoffs as she explains: “we've got a different style of leadership and I think it's going to be a lot of fun. We're not going to be, by any means, the top team in the league to start off but I think were going to get better as the year progresses. I think we've got the right mix of girls with the right attitude that they'll get better fast.’ A big factor in the offseason for this up- coming season came from the 3D Basket- ball Academy, which is a basketball club organization based out of the lower mainland. Murdoch was able to snag two recruits out of this program in Jen- nifer Marsh and Jennifer Bruce, athletes who without the 3D program may have slipped through the recruitment cracks as Murdoch explains “the organizer of that club gave me some contact informa- tion on the girls he thought could poten- tially play at the college level and possibly CIS and that’s how we got contact with Jennifer Bruce in particular because she played for a smaller school and wasn't on the radar, whereas club basketball coach- es do a very good job at promoting their athletes. If you ask the right questions you can find a hidden gem.” Of course not all recruits are coming in from out of town. This year’s team has also added four new local athletes: Mer- cedes Van Koughnet, Christine Kennedy, Emily Kaehn and Chelsea Thorn with a fifth local, Brooklyn Ward, currently red shirted, Murdoch is thrilled with the level of local talent she was able to pull from this year as “the more local athletes I can get the better because they can live at home and the costs are that much more reasonable.” One of the local women joining the team this year actually has CIS experience and therefore Murdoch is very excited to have the skills of Christine Kennedy who she explains “played 3 years at McGill, which is a CIS school. She's originally from Prince George so she's come back to play British Columbia Col in front of her home crowd and it’s a real- ly good story. Both her and Beckett have CIS experience and they both played to- gether in high school at College Heights so they're back together on the court for the first time in 4 years.” Murdoch has extremely high expecta- tions of Kennedy and goes as far to say “we don't have Nazareno or Wallace to rely on so we need to change our style of play. The addition of Christine Ken- nedy does that immediately.’ This state- ment illustrates Murdoch's tremendous confidence in Kennedy's basketball abil- ity as Wallace and Nazareno are UNBC legends and therefore left enormous shoes to fill for any athlete in a new pro- gram. Chelsea Thorn was a late addition to this year's roster. A local to PG, Thorn played for Grand Prairie last year. Murdoch is excited that “she came on board late this summer and got into the nursing pro- gram so were thrilled to have her wearing the Green and Gold this year.’ In addition to these recruits, Murdoch will also be holding open tryouts for po- tential walk-ons during the first week of school with the official roster being final- ized by Monday September 14. In turn, these new recruits will have the opportunity to play for an extremely suc- cessful and enormously respected basket- ball program. Murdoch who joined the T-Wolves coaching staff in 1997 has since become one of the most highly regarded basketball coaches in the prov- ince. She credits much of her success to the guidance she received from, Canad- ian Icon, Ken Shields who she studied under for two years. Murdoch expressed leges’ Athictic Association CHAMPIONS great admiration for Shields and beamed over the influence he has had on UNBC’s basketball program exclaiming: “the biggest thing that Ken brought is an understanding of what it takes to A. win a championship and B. take this pro- gram to the next level. His knowledge is so widespread in every facet of athletics that he was able to give us some ideas on how to make our lives easier a little bit and at the same time move forward in a direction that would draw recruits and maintain a strong level of play.’ Despite UNBC’s womens basketball team's enormous success in the past dec- ade Murdoch is hesitant about a potential move to the CIS level. When asked about these reservations Murdoch stated: “If we were to go into the CIS today with my current program we might struggle a bit. We are doing very well at the BC- CAA level but the CIS level is just that much higher. If we want to compete with the SFUs and the UBCs we have to re- cruit nationally and internationally and develop some very good players locally that could compete at that level but we're a small school and wed be competing against schools that have forty to sixty thousand students whereas we have a thirty-five-hundred student base so the problem becomes how do we attract those CIS athletes here. Right now we can't attract them at all because we're not CIS so it’s a bit of an unknown.” Murdoch will have a better understand- ing of her team’s ability to play at the CIS level after UNBC’s exhibition games this season as she explains “we have our toughest exhibition schedule ever. We're playing CIS schools and that comes with September 16, 2009 + Over the Edge No Nazareno, No Wallace, No Problem this whole thing of how do we get better, were going to get better by playing the top teams.” When asked about the pressure she faces coaching a team that has become accus- tomed to success; Murdoch states that, ‘Gf there is any pressure it’s brought on by myself because I am no longer a young coach with no experience. I started out with a program and we've developed that program into something that I’m pretty proud of so the pressure is on me to maintain that and keep getting better and never ever get stagnant. So while there's no pressure internally from the institu- tion as they're happy with everything and the student athletes we are producing are amazing the pressure is still there to con- tinue getting better.” Unfortunately for T-Wolf fans the T- Wolves will be starting off the year with a very heavy away schedule leaving only one weekend of home games this semes- ter, which will take place in the Northern Sports Centre November 27" and 28". With only two home games this semester T-Wolf super-fans will have no reason to leave anything in the tank and I expect everyone to attend and get the T-Wolf fandom craziness started, There is no home- court advantage like UNBC home- court advantage and there is no reason for that to change this sea- son. November 27", mark it in your cal- endar, input it in your blackberry, write it on your fridge, whatever you do, do not miss what will be one of the rowdiest weekends in the Charles Jago Northern Sports Centre's history.