Women’s Hoops Breaks Convo Attendance Record

Yesterday, the women’s team broke their own attendance record at the Convo after packing in a crowd of 6590 who didn’t let a little looming storm ruin their (hopefully) last opportunity to see two program-defining seniors play their final home games in Seniors Nikki Newman and Kirby Burkholder.  Incredibly, in addition to continuing Kenny Brooks’ teams unprecedented run of improvement and success over much of the last decade, both Newman and Burkholder are graduates of Turner Ashby right there in the Valley so to say this was a special one is a huge understatement.

And of course the Dukes didn’t disappoint, destroying William & Mary 83-42 and pushing their already championship-winning CAA record to 14-1. The women’s tourney isn’t till the week after the men in Upper Marlboro, MD so the team has one more regular season game left at Northeastern this Wednesday.

We really can’t do justice to what Coach Brooks and his players have done during his tenure, so we’ll let three incredible stats speak for themselves.  First, yesterday’s attendance was 2471 more than attended the top CAA men’s game this weekend. Second, the JMU women have AVERAGED more attendance than seven of the ten men’s programs in the conference for the season (incredibly, JMU’s men’s team leads the way if that tells you something about the appropriateness of continuing to remain in the CAA) trailing on JMU, UNCW, and CofC (barely).  And best of all, that’s NINE straight seasons the women’s team has won at least 24 games. All while producing some of the finest student-athletes on campus in the true sense of that term.

Now if they could just avoid the 8/9 game and its inevitable matchup with a one-seed in the Big Dance (yes, this is one of those rare instances where a lower 10/11 seed might be a blessing in disguise).