After the 2012-13 season ended, Long Beach State women’s basketball team head coach Jody Wynn metaphorically compared her team to a “car without a steering wheel.” LBSU had finished the season with an average of 19.5 turnovers per game, which was the highest among teams that finished in the top five of the Big West conference standings.
The 49ers’ turnover-prone season was largely caused by their lack of ball-handling guards, especially after junior point guard Hallie Meneses went down with an anterior cruciate ligament tear in the summer and was sidelined for the entire season. Wynn had to shuffle her starting lineup just before the start of the season, and Alex Sanchez assumed much of the ball-handling duties for the ‘Niners.
Granted, Sanchez exceeded all expectations by leading the team in both scoring (10.6 points per game) and assists (4.1 per game) en route to earning All-Big West honorable mention despite having never played point guard her entire career before last season. However, The Beach still lacked an offensive thrust from the point guard position, as each of Sanchez’s teammates averaged less than two assists per game for the season.
To put the 49ers’ inability to take care of the ball in a clearer perspective, it only managed 12.9 assists on 54.5 field goal attempts per game, meaning only 23 percent of their shots from the field were assisted. Their tendency to take unassisted field goal attempts consequently forced them to take difficult, contested shots, as evidenced by the abysmal .377 field goal percentage, which marks the poorest conversion rate among top five teams in the Big West conference.
This year, Meneses is back from a redshirt season to spearhead the 49ers’ offense. Wynn will expect Meneses to replicate her performance from the 2012 Big West Tournament, in which the ‘Niners made a Cinderella run to the finals before falling to UC Santa Barbara. Meneses was named to the Big West All-Tournament Team after averaging 10.3 points and 4 assists per game in the postseason.
The Beach will even have some depth at the point guard position this year, as freshman newcomer Anna Kim will provide the offensive spark. A four-year letterwinner at Brea Olinda High School, Kim may even be the best natural playmaker on the team, as she averaged 6.4 assists per game as a senior.
But whether or not the return of Meneses and Kim’s arrival at The Beach will bring significant improvements to the team’s offense remains to be seen. After all, LBSU is averaging 19.7 turnovers per game since Wynn became its head coach in 2009. The 49ers also only shot over .400 from the field in just one season in 2009-10 (.405) during the Wynn Era.
What the ‘Niners can count on this year is experience. They are returning seven letterwinners, four of whom are starters from last season. Fifth-seeded LBSU lost its first round Big West Tournament game to Cal State Fullerton, but still earned an at-large berth to the Women’s National Invitational Tournament. There aren’t many teams in the Big West with rosters consisting of juniors with the experience of playing in the tournament final and the WNIT as LBSU’s core players have done over the last two seasons.
It’s extremely difficult to predict an outcome of the ‘Niners’ season, as they’re in a conference that seems to have more parity from top to bottom than ever. Barring a major injury to one of their core players, The Beach has the combination of talent, chemistry and experience to aim for a top three finish in the regular season standings.
Winning the single-elimination tournament for any team in the Big West will by and large be a crapshoot, but a top-three regular season finish and an appearance at the tournament final is a viable goal for the improved 49ers.