Sun Belt coaches pick UALR

LITTLE ROCK — Joe Foley’s voice should be dripping with optimism when he talks about his UALR women’s basketball team.

Foley, who enters his seventh year as the Trojans coach, returns the nucleus of a team that reached the Sun Belt Conference Tournament final and earned the program’s first NCAA Tournament victory.

Sun Belt coaches unanimously picked UALR as the West Division favorite Tuesday and tapped forward Chastity Reed as the conference’s preseason player of the year.

Still, despite all the good news, Foley’s drawl remained coated in caution.

“It’s that much harder to go in as a preseason pick and have everyone shooting at you,” Foley said.

Not that UALR doesn’t have an ample armory of talent to answer the challenge, namely the inside out game of Reed that serves as the focal point of Foley’s motion offense.

The senior forward and preseason Wooden Award candidate averaged 24.3 points a game last season, which included nine games of 30 points or more, and carried an offense that struggled at times with its outside shooting. She spent most of the season playing with a developing stress fracture in her foot, which ultimately sidelined her over the summer.

“I knew when we brought her in as a freshman we were getting a pretty good athlete,” Foley said, “but I didn’t know we were getting that caliber of basketball player.”

Foley said senior guard Shanika Butler, who averaged 9.6 points and a team-high 4.4 assists per game, should offer an improved perimeter threat. Point guard Asriel Rolfe’s return from a stress fracture in her leg, which required her to wear a splint in practice, gives the Trojans another player who can create off the dribble and attack the rim.

Foley’s chief concern is finding a balance among the four players surrounding Reed, who faced a bevy of defensive looks last season.

“You want them to get a lot of touches, and it can slow your offense down,” he said of Reed. “When you’ve got kids like Chas, you want to make sure they’re getting their touches. Obviously, they’ll become the focus, but they’ve got the ability to take over a game.”

The steady hands are a boon, but they’ll need to blend with six freshmen who are being thrown into the mix and expected to play reserve roles.

If there is room for a freshman to fill a role, it’s at the slot vacated by former off-guard Kim Sitzmann, the Trojans’ second-leading scorer at 10.4 points per game and their most consistent three-point threat at 40.2 percent.

So far the newcomers have adapted well in learning the offense and held their own scrimmaging against one another. It’s when they get in mixed company with upperclassmen that a gap emerges, Foley said.

“When you’ve got returning starters, they’re expecting everything to be like it was toward the end of [last] year playing in a groove,” he said. “Then you throw in six freshmen, and naturally we don’t come close to playing that way.”

Foley said forward Hannah Fohne, a 6-2 player from Walker, La., offers a post presence with a deft touch around the basket with both hands. Foley said Karisma Tyson, a 6-0 guard from Memphis, has one of the purest shots he’s coached.

Just how quickly cohesion forms will prove critical if the Trojans hope to compete at the top of the Sun Belt.

In the Eastern Division, defending champion Middle Tennessee State is in transition with the departure of four starters from a 25-6 team that earned the conference’s other NCAA bid. The key loss was Alysha Clark, the 2009 Sun Belt player of the year who averaged 28 points and 12 rebounds per game.

In the past two seasons, the Blue Raiders were the lone obstacle blocking UALR’s path to conference tournament crowns, including last season’s 70-68 overtime loss.

Despite an NCAA Tournament victory over Georgia Tech, Foley said the Trojans have to understand the fleeting nature of success.

“We talk about how hard it is to stay on top,” Foley said. “We’ve been the ones wanting to get there, and we finally made that dream come true. Now comes the hard part of getting ready to that again.”