Stanford Crushes Cal Poly

Nothin’ like home cooking. The Sanford Women's Basketball team played their first regular season game at home and beat Cal Poly by a score of 86-51. A perfect tonic for getting beat by UConn less then a week ago.

Hopefully this blog will be short but sweet since it is late, although R will be mad at me because she won’t get a chance to proof read this and check for typos. We could make it a drinking game, find the typos, take a drink, but then our readers would be sauced by the third paragraph. So here goes.

Back to Stanford. It was a double-dose tonight, because at the same time as the Stanford basketball game, the Stanford Women’s soccer was opening their first round of the NCAA tournament at home. It was fun to get updates from that game on Twitter, Stanford prevailing 1-0 over Cal Fullerton and advancing.

Back to Basketball, on the way to the game, C and R saw #10 Cal lost to unranked George Washigton. Good news on the Pac-12 front. Yet, there but for the grace of… we didn’t want to crow too much, lest Stanford suffer the same fate. And then the Stanford game started out. And Stanford started out slow, made some turnovers…commited some fouls...... Cal Poly leading for the first seven minutes....oh boy. Then Chiney took over, and Stanford finished the half on a 30-12 run, lhalf time score 41-25. Smooth sailing.

Chiney Ogwumike scored a career-high 36 points (and almost single-handedly outscored all of Cal Poly before she got to take a rest), and grabbed 11 rebounds for her third double-double in three games and the 61st of her career. Mikaela Ruef grabbed a career-high 14 rebounds and finished with nine points, although the crowd was cheering for her to get her own double-double. No one else got in double figures, and Stanford is still searching for others to score. Point Guard Amber Orrrrange (no, that spelling is intentional to give her some extra love, so no drinking) who had a career high 22 points vs. UConn, had a quiet night six points but four assists.

Stanford's Lili Thompson (AP Photo/Tony Avelar)

How did the freshmen do? Kailee Johnson (KJ) got her third start in three games and scored seven, but a surprise was seeing freshmen Lili (Lee-Lee) Thompson join her. Lili had a couple of turnovers in the first few minutes and head coach Tara Vanderveer does not tolerate rookie mistakes well, and subbed her out (also to try other combos). Then Lili came back in and played really well. She has an aggressiveness, a passion that is sometimes missing from Stanford as a whole. When little ol’ Lili, who stands 5’7, swatted at the ball above 6’5 Molly Schlemwer’s head, you know this is a kid that won’t back down.

Lili scored six and had five assists, one a fantastic lob pass to Chiney under the basket which was really an alley-oop, so Chiney did just that, caught the ball and shot it in the air without landing. And made the basket. Not very many women basketball players can do that. (We call that shot a “Nneka” because just about the only other women’s college player not named Brittney Griner who could do that last year was Chiney’s sister, Nneka Ogwumike).

The Samuleson’s were three of nine on three-point shots. Older sister Bonnie made two and freshie Karlie made one. Last playable freshmen was Erica McCall and she scored eight. We like the way she posts up under the basket. The freshies combined for 27 points. Not bad. Rounding out the five freshman is Briana Roberson, who is still injured and did not play.

Then after the game, who did we meet? None other than Lili Thompson’s parents. They were super sweet and surrounded by Lili’s sibling’s and their grandkids. They were so adorable, C even gave her victory ball to one of them. You know they must be special kids for her to give that up. Glad to have them around and C and R say welcome to California! Here’s to many more victories!

Follow C and R for more Stanford victories on Facebook and Twitter, too!

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