Jan 29th, 2010
We here at JakesTakeOnSports were right about Cal’s women’s basketball team, but for the wrong reason. But since whys and hows don’t matter in sports – or at least that’s what coaches tell us – we will just take credit for being right.
Alexis Gray-Lawson has benefited from having only one class this term -- Daley Cal photo by Nick Fradkin
You see, we figured the Bears, despite their disappointing start, would be a factor in the Pac-10 late in the season because its crew of talented freshmen would mature and gel and get confidence – and do all those other things that talented freshmen typically do.
Cal is indeed becoming a factor, winning its fifth straight game by beating Arizona 75-53 on Thursday, transforming itself from a 6-8 team that was slogging along with an 0-3 Pac-10 record to one that is 5-3 and putting heat on UCLA and USC. The Bears are not going to catch Stanford, of course, but they are starting to look like the team they were supposed to be when they were ranked 17th in the preseason Associated Press poll.
The weird thing is the reason. It’s not the maturation of the freshmen teenagers that’s turned things around, but the maturation of a 22-year-old fifth-year senior who had started 107 college games before this season even started.
Alexis Gray-Lawson had always been a bit of enigma, scoring a bunch of points one game and disappearing the next. But she seems to have figured it out about 120 games into her career. Gray-Lawson has been a 5-foot-8 dynamo throughout January, and her past two games have been crazy-good.
After setting a Cal record with her 47 points in Saturday’s overtime win over Oregon State, Gray-Lawson turned around and had the fifth-highest total in school history on Thursday by scoring 39 points against Arizona.
What’s got into her? Well, she talks about how she’s getting used to the freshmen, and figuring out what she has to do, and learning how to come off screens, and all that stuff that sounds like progress. And coach Joanne Boyle talks about she can see the difference in the way Gray-Lawson carries herself, and how she has added variety to her game, and all those things that coaches treasure.
But the biggest factor may be that Gray-Lawson has only one class to worry about now. As a fifth-year senior (she got a year of eligibility back because she tore her anterior-cruciate ligament nine games into her sophomore season), she does not have many credits to satisfy. She took three classes during the fall, which is when she continued to have up-and-down games on the court, but since January, she’s had only one class. It allows her to spend hours of extra practice time by herself perfecting every shot in her considerable repertoire.
“Just being in the gym all that time is a big help,” Gray-Lawson said.
We said throughout our college life that academics just got in the way of college success, and here you go.
Over the past seven games, Gray-Lawson has averaged 27.6 points and did not score fewer than 19 points in any of them.
Coaches often say they don’t want their other players standing around watching a standout scorer work, but Boyle has no problem with that as long as Gray-Lawson is scoring as consistently as she has lately.
“There has been a shift in her, you can just see it,” Boyle said. “She’s feeling it. As long as she’s hot, we’re going to keep feeding it to her.”
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