Recap The Court

Photo: TBNewsWatch

Jacob Smith

I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention to OUA preseason women’s basketball but there’s a team that has played five preseason games that we should probably talk about. That is the Lakehead Thunderwolves who have went 4-1 in five preseason games, led by Ally Burke who’s been leading them in scoring in each of the games.

Whether you think wins and losses are important in preseason or not, the Thunderwolves leave Winnipeg after playing three games this past weekend with a record of 2-1, beating Winnipeg and Brandon, and losing to Manitoba. What stands out more is how they’re playing and the level of execution on both sides of the ball.

Lakehead plays a very patient and precise brand of basketball. They focus heavily on ball movement and if they can get into a high-low two person style game, they’ll use their rebounding to their advantage. In their 63-50 win over the Winnipeg Wesmen, Lakehead won the rebounding battle 48-37, nine coming from Kelly-Ann Coulombe and six from Eva Guilera and their offensive star Ally Burke.

Ally Burke is a third year player from Timmins Ontario who averaged 10.6 points and 2.5 rebounds per game last year with 2.3 assists, and through five preseason games, she appears to be improving on every single stat. In Lakehead’s most recent 66-64 win over Brandon, Burke had 28 points with six assists and five steals, building off her 19 point, six rebound, three assist and 2 steal performance in a win over Winnipeg the day prior. Often leading with either Kirpa Brar or Eva Guilera, Ally has shown to be the Thunderwolves top scoring threat going into the season.

With the Thunderwolves team rebounding abilities they’ve shown through the preseason and the steady balanced offensive attack, led by Ally Burke who’s seemingly built on many aspects of her game going into this season, it’ll be interesting to see where the Thunderwolves stack up in the OUA.

The OUA Central has a lot of questions with the changes the top teams have gone through, and preseason has shown some good, bad, expected and unexpected from different teams, with Lakehead falling in the ‘pleasantly unexpected’ category for me going into the next chunk of OUA preseason.