Team goes down under
But sophomore Taylor Richards said when they got to the land down under, it wasn’t anything like they were expecting.
The uniforms were only a beginning.
“Their uniforms threw us off,” Richards said. “They wear a full-piece body suit. Our coach warned us, but we didn’t believe her.”
Head Coach Raegan Pebley said planning a “foreign tour” pretty much started when she was hired at USU.
Traveling to different countries, Pebley said, has been something that is increasing in popularity with college teams.
“These foreign tours are such a recruiting advantage,” she said. “When we were doing so much recruiting back then, and we really had to have something to get the kids excited.”
Richards said the chance to go to Australia was part of the draw to the USU team for her, and when it finally happened, she said it was really cool.
The Aggies began their trip with a near 14-hour plane ride to Sydney. When they got there, they jumped right into their first game – against the Australian Jr. National team.
“We were in the country 24 hours and kind of jet-lagged,” Pebley said. “I knew the cards were stacked against them.”
“We played [the Jr. National Team] twice in Sydney,” Richards said. “The first time wasn’t very good, we got our butts kicked.”
The Aggies lost the game, Pebley said, by around 65 points.
However, the next night was a totally different story.
“We played them the next day and lost by one,” Pebley said. A last-second shot from the Sydney team put them up on top for the second time in two nights.
The Aggies played two other teams while in Australia. The team traveled to Brisbane and Caines to face a semi-professional and another professional team.
Pebley said the team gained a lot of experience playing in Australia – something they will be able to use this season with the step up into the Western Athletic Conference.
“We’re a much more confident team and I really think we’re a much more competitive team,” Pebley said. “I really think our kids did not take this trip for granted.”
Richards also said the trip helped the Ags work together on and off the court. But the best part, she said, was just getting to go out of the country.
“It was a lot of vacationing,” she said. “A little bit of basketball, a lot of vacationing.”
-aedmunds@cc.usu.edu