USA Women’s All-Stars End Tour with a Win!

Carl Berman

8 Jul 2012

Blog

11 comments

Great, great, game tonight in WUDALIANCHI..   Yep, I finally figured out the spelling of the name of the city we are in.  Took long enough huh??   Well, I got the spelling of a label of one of the labels from the celebratory drinks they served.  Go figure, that’s what it takes to get it right… So there it is….

So now that I have the picture of the label, I suppose it’s pretty obvious that we toasted cheers to our victory in our final game against the national B team.   A well fought 90-88 win.   Katie Bussey led the USA with 19 points, Dawn Evans played played a great floor game and scored 14 while Amanda Johnson added 15. Seems that the referee’s and game officials and town officials had a meeting last night after the game and it was agreed that there was a “mistake” made during the course of the game.  To their credit, the officiating was pretty good tonight and both teams shot the ball very, very well.  Of course, China was something ridiculous like 26-for-28 from the line. Very, very good.  But we prevailed and scored the go ahead layup with 3.1 seconds to go and held on for the win as a  half court shot from China bounced off the rim as time expired.

What a great experience overall for all of us as players and coaches.

Comments from Head Coach NetScouts Basketball’s Chris Denker: “It was a great win for our group, particularly the way they came back to play after the officiating issues last night. Both teams played great tonight. China shot the ball extremely well. It’s wonderful to finish the tour with a win.”

Stats

Katie Bussey (Montana State):  19 points, 1 rebound, 2 assists, 1 steal

Dawn Evans (James Madison):  14 points, 3 rebounds, 2 assists, 2 steals

Jence Rhoads (Vanderbilt):  6 points, 2 rebounds

Briana Gilbreath (USC):  4 points, 1 rebound

Brittany Carter (Memphis): 5 points, 2 rebounds

Becky Burke (Louisville): 0 points, 0 rebounds, 2 assists

Kristina Santiago (Cal Poly):  12 points, 3 rebounds, 2 steals

Amanda Johnson (Oregon):  15 points, 2 rebounds

Kali Bennett (Arizona State):   4 points, 5 rebounds

Becca Tobin (Arizona State): 6 points, 5 rebounds

Cierra Brevard (Florida State): 5 points, 4 rebounds

So we were going to head to the night market after the game, but by halftime, it was pouring rain so hard you could hear it in the arena and it has continued and is still raining hard tonight.

Oh well, we are heading to Heihe tomorrow at 5am for departure to Beijing.  It’s about an hour drive north of us and our flight isn’t until 11am-ish.   We figured we’d go and get up early and try to head across the border to Russia for an hour or so and get a chance to stop in and say we stepped foot there!!!

Then on to Beijing.  We had one of our last games cancelled that was supposed to be tomorrow, so we get to head to Beijing a day early.   We’ve got plans now to head to Tiananmen Square, some of the Olympic Venues and then… the SILK market… this is the place, as we hear it… is the shopper’s dream…  this is the place to find all of the designer bags, watches, shoes, you name it… and apparently for cheap.   If we get the chance we might head out to the Great Wall, but that’s supposed to be more than a 3 hour ride from our hotel location.. We’ll see and let you know.

Can’t wait for a little sightseeing and then to head home and get on the recruiting road.  We will try to get some more photos of the towns and such together tomorrow during our travel day.

Thanks to Coach Ryan Johnson for this report from Wudalianchi, China. We’ll try to post stats later today.