Exciting things are happening with the Peninsula College women’s basketball team.
For the first time since Mitch Freeman’s men’s team made a surprise run to the NWAC championship game back in 2018, Peninsula has a team in the Final Four.
The women have won 13 straight and are 24-3 overall.
A criticism I’ve heard about the Pirates is that the rosters for Peninsula College sports tend to be filled with players from other countries and other states. This ignores the fact that Peninsula has to compete against other community colleges based in large metropolitan areas with huge pools of nearby student-athletes such as Tacoma, Seattle, Everett, Bellevue and Portland, Ore.
Pierre LaBossiere.
What makes the women’s team particularly special is that it has some star players from both Hawaii and Alaska such as Keeli-Jade Smith and Itaua Tuisaula. But it’s also loaded with local players. Millie Long and Madison Cooke of the Port Angeles Roughriders and Hope Glasser of the Sequim Wolves all play heavy minutes for the Pirates. Gina Brown of Port Townsend has also been a contributor during the season.
In the women’s Sweet 16 win over North Idaho, Glasser had 11 rebounds. Cooke had her best game of the year with 14 points and 14 rebounds, making 4-of-7 from 3-point range.
In the Elite Eight win over Portland, Glasser had 15 points, Cooke had six points, five rebounds and three steals, and Long, coming back from a sprained ankle, did much of the ball-handling for the game and played stellar defense. This team is a nice mix of women from three corners of the world.
Here’s some amazing statistics about this team. I hate to harp on this too much, but it’s not meant as a criticism. It’s meant to show how tough this team is and how amazing it is that they keep winning.
In the two NWAC tournament games, the women shot 17.5 percent (7-for-40) from 3-point range. If you take Cooke’s Sweet 16 game out of the equation, they shot 9.1 percent (3-for-33) from beyond the arc in the two games.
From the free-throw line, it’s not much better. The Pirates shot 43.3 percent in their two games (13-for-30).
And they still won both games.
That’s just how good their defense is. They have played 13 games in which they given up fewer than 50 points. They almost always lead in rebounds. They almost always win the turnover battle. In short, they win the grit stats. The hustle stats.
The women are going up against some elite teams now. Clackamas, the Pirates’ semifinal foe, is 26-3. The heavy favorite over in the other bracket, Lane, is 29-0. They can maybe win without the 3-pointer, but I believe they will absolutely have to shoot better from the free-throw line to win their next game or two.
They’ve climbed this far, that’s not such a big hill to overcome.
If people want to watch the games and can’t get over to Everett, there’s a pretty good streaming service at www.nwacsportsnetwork.com. It costs $12 to watch all the games on Final Four weekend. The games are also being broadcast at KONP.
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
