December 21, 2015

Watch out for Roadrunners

The Cardinal's next visitors are the CSU Bakersfield Roadrunners on Tuesday afternoon at 2:00. The game will be live-streamed by Stanford Athletics here. KZSU will broadcast the game, and live stats will be here.

Some people are touting this game as McCall (Erica) vs McCall (Greg, Erica's father and the Roadrunners' head coach). I doubt that they look at it that way. I expect that each of them will be delighted to win and sorry for the other's loss.

Bird and her dad at FILA National Tounament in 2010

The Cardinal and Roadrunners have played each other just once before. That was four years ago when Bird was a high school senior and Greg had just stepped up from assistant coach to head coach at CSUB, which had just made the transition to NCAA Division I.

The Cardinal won that game easily and, on paper, it looks like the re-match will have the same result.

The Roadrunners play in the Western Athletic Conference (WAC). They placed second in the WAC in the past two seasons and were picked to finish second this year, but are currently standing at the bottom with a 2-10 win-loss record.

The Roadrunners have had a tough non-conference schedule (South Carolina, Oregon State, Arizona State, UCLA), but it's hard to understand why they've lost six other games. They lost their top shooter to graduation, but they still have their three-year star rebounder 6-2 senior forward Batabe Zampare, who is leading the team this season with 11.8 points and 10.4 rebounds per game.

Zampare is backed up by 6-0 redshirt junior forward Erika Williams and 5-2 senior guard Alyssa Shannon, who score 11.3 and 9.7 points per game, respectively.

But there are also five freshmen and two sophomores on the roster. Perhaps the Roadrunners are another cake in the oven that's not quite done yet. They just broke an eight-game losing streak on Saturday with a victory over Cal Poly in which 5-9 freshman guard Addi Walters led all scorers with 15 points on 55% shooting.

Here are Bakersfield's statistics and roster.

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