USU Women’s Basketball faces uncertain but optimistic future under Wes Brooks | Sports

LOGAN – As the season grows closer, the anticipation for the new era of Utah State women’s basketball grows, too. The Aggies will play their first (unofficial) game under hew head coach Wes Brooks this Friday, an exhibition against Westminster. On Nov. 4, the real thing begins with a home game against Kansas City.

Ever since being hired on April 1, Brooks has had a lot to do to try and settle things down with the program. A rough few years have left the women’s basketball program out in the cold. But during the team’s media day, and it’s time at the Mountain West Media Days, there was plenty of optimism and smiles. Instead of the offseason practice duds, players were able to don the blue and white threads that shone in a way they only can in their unused preseason state.

There’s an outward level of optimism among the whole team that is aimed primarily at the future instead of a shaky past. A past that currently defines the program and is the reason the Aggies were picked to finish last in the preseason poll for a fifth consecutive season.

“I think having Coach Wes has really brought the program to a different height than you’ll see from last year,” said senior guard Cheyenne Stubbs, one of the returners from the 2023-24 USU squad. “From day one Coach Wes set the tone when he was hired, and then through summer it just kept going up and up and up, and we just haven’t looked back.”

That enormous monkey on the back of the program is one that every player and every coach wants to cast off as soon as it is possible.

A difficult past

The women’s team has lived in the enormous shadow that is the elite USU men’s basketball program. Years upon years of success for the men have drowned out anything the women have accomplished, which is unfortunately not much. The university didn’t have an official team until the 1970s and it didn’t last two decades before being shuttered for another 20 years. And upon being revived in 2003, the Aggies needed another six years to have a season with a winning record. The program’s overall winning percentage is just 0.335.

In the final years of the WAC era, it looked like women’s basketball was taking a turn under head coach Raegan Pebley, who piloted the team to its first ever (and as of now, only) 20-win season and the first back-to-back years with a winning record. But Pebley left for Fresno State and later TCU and the program went slowly downhill.

Over the last 11 seasons since Pebley left, the Aggies have had two campaigns finish with a winning record – and both only just barely (17-15 and 17-16).

The last five years have only made things worse.

Way, way worse.

Over the last five years the Aggies rank 349th out of 362 teams in win/loss percentage, sitting at .221 (32-113). Isolated to the last two seasons, it somehow still gets worse with USU ranking in the bottom 10 with an overall record of 9-51, but the Aggies own the fourth-worst point differential for that two-year span, having been outscored by 1,089 points in the last 60 games.

The drop into truly awful territory lines up with — coincidentally or not — the departure of Jerry Finkbeiner, who took over the team for Pebley and led the team for seven seasons of mostly mediocrity (both winning seasons of the Mountain West era were under his watch, but also multiple single-digit win seasons and a 96-124 overall record). But call his teams mediocre all you want because they were vastly better than what came after him under one year led by his son, Ben Finkbeiner, and the longer-term successor Kayla Ard.

Ard’s tenure started off on the wrong foot and ended in literal embarrassment. Her introductory press conference was nixed by the COVID pandemic. Instead it was a pre-recorded interview/conversation between her, John Hartwell and Doug Hoffman in chairs spaced comfortably apart. There was no chance for her to connect with fans and build a brand or public vision for the team.

Over the four seasons of her time at USU, Ard posted one season with more than five wins. Last year, in her final season with the Aggies, her squad was embarrassingly bad. It lost multiple games to non-Division I teams (one in an exhibition and another in the regular season). They lost 13 games by at least 20 points, the ninth-most losses by that margin by any team in the country.

Following what was ultimately her final game as head coach — a 36-point loss to Boise State in the Mountain West Tournament in Las Vegas — Ard was met in the hallway of the Thomas & Mack Center and was informed she was being fired before she even had a chance to speak with the media or even the players who were now no longer under her leadership.

The most famous thing to come out of USU women’s basketball in the last several years was the viral clip of Ard telling the media she’d been fired.

Three weeks later, Brooks was officially announced as the next head coach of Utah State.

A young team full of newcomers

Despite it only having been a few months since Ard’s firing, less than half the current roster played under the former coach. Such is the nature of college sports that on any given year the roster could look almost entirely different.

Much was made of the USU men’s basketball team welcoming 12 newcomers to last year’s team under the ultimately short tenure of Danny Sprinkle, but that kind of turnover had long become the norm for the women’s team. For three straight seasons, Ard had to replace at least seven players on her roster. Sprinkle’s team overcame the extreme offseason attrition to win 28 games, including a Mountain West title and an NCAA Tournament game. The women won five games total last year.

Brooks wasn’t spared the high amount of turnover this offseason. There were nine players from last year who left — eight via the transfer portal — prior to his arrival and he wound up replacing them with 10 newcomers – three transfers and seven high school graduates.

Yes, seven freshman. On one team. It’s a blast to the past in terms of team building. With players so easily able to transfer and not stick around, relying so heavily on players that often aren’t ready to play in their first season is a gamble. But it’s one Brooks is willing to take. He’s emphasized going out and getting a certain kind of player and however he can find them is what he’s going to take.

“We’re going to bring in people who can shoot the three,” Brooks said. “It’s going to be very hard to play at Utah State if you can’t make 3-point shots. So we recruit to what we’re trying to do. Obviously we got in here [in] late April and so the recruiting season for this past year was kind of done and we kind of already had to go with the six returners but then we had to fill in nine, so we tried to go out and get shooting.”

As essentially half the entire team, all will be significant contributors in one way or the other. At the very least they’re expecting to play quite a bit.

“I definitely think there’ll be a lot of minutes for the younger players,” said Elise Livingston, one of those seven freshmen. “Everyone has really proven themselves in the summer so I’m excited to see how much everyone will play and compete.”

Much of the Aggies’ success this season will be heavily dependent on how well these seven rookies fare and how quickly they’ll be able to adapt.

“We have to do our strengths to the best of our ability,” said Denae Skelton, another of the freshmen. “So if I’m going to shoot, I need to make sure that I’m shooting the right shots to find the best success for our team in the role that I can play. And I think that’s what everyone else is going to have to do because we are young, but we’re gonna build up this team. In 2-3 years we’re gonna be a huge senior class.”

And the more playing time these ladies get, the less like rookies they’ll play.

“They’ve been freshmen from June to December. Come January, as they calendar turns, they won’t be freshmen anymore,” Brooks said. “We just have to continue to grow up. But it’s exciting, because freshmen become sophomores. Sophomores become juniors. And juniors become seniors. And that experience really paid dividends.”

Trying to get a buy-in in for the long term in the era of the transfer portal is a challenge. At the same time, though, the players know what they’ve gotten into and hope to build for the future.

“I plan on being here for four years. I love it here,” Skelton said. “Whether people transfer or not that’s their decision. But I think being loyal to your school and helping build a program with your school is an incredible thing to do.”

Fast-paced system with a TON of 3-pointers

Brooks hasn’t been shy about sharing his goals of crafting a team that plays faster than virtually every team in the country. On offense and defense the Aggies will be blazing fast. The first open shot will be the one USU takes and on defense they’ll harass and press all 94 feet to create as much chaos for opposing teams as it is possible for the Aggies to create.

The breakneck pace is something newcomers and returners alike are adjusting to.

“(It’s the) fastest I’ve ever played before,” said Livingston.

“A lot of teams like to say ‘We play fast.’ Here we really do play fast,” said Skelton.

A side note on this kind of pace is that it will probably benefit players that would normally be on the fringe of getting playing time. Going that fast means tiring out much sooner and requiring more subs and more depth. It’s another major reason the younger players on the team will be so important. They have to be ready to perform in the likely higher amount of playing time they’re going to get.

Another highly identifiable part of Brooks’ Aggies will be high-volume 3-point shooting. And much like the pace, high volume isn’t just the operative descriptor where it can be compared to other “high volume” 3-point shooting teams.. Brooks has made the bold claim that his team will attempt 40 3-pointers per game, and he’s dead serious about that.

“We’re gonna break the single-season record for three point attempts this year at Utah State,” Brooks said.

FYI, the Utah State team single-season records for 3-pointers made and attempted both came in the 2012-13 when that year’s team made 247 of 752 threes. That comes out to an average of 7.7 of 23.5 per game (and those averages were both top 20 in the country that year).

Brooks’ calculous is simple. He wants his team to make four 3-pointers per quarter, or 16 per game. At best teams will shoot 40 percent from deep so that’s a minimum of 40 attempts to reach that goal. Coming anywhere close to those goals in any given game would set new program highs. USU’s single-game best for made 3-pointers is 14, done twice in the 2012-13 season (vs Idaho and also at New Mexico State) with the highest attempt total being 34, also done twice though in the 2021-22 season (vs Arkansas State and at Southeastern).

The early returns on the player’s ability to hit those high marks are about where you’d expect them to be in fall camp. They’re coming up short but are a work in progress. Brooks reported that in a scrimmage against a male practice squad the Aggies made 9 of 33 threes. The 33 long-distance shots would have been a season high last year and the nine makes would have tied for second-most. But it’s also only a 27.3 percent success rate on those attempts, well below the lofty 40 percent goal and notably below the NCAA average of roughly 31 percent.

Although the 16 threes on 40 attempts is something Brooks has said he’d like his team to do, he’s also consistently used benchmarks of 33 or 35 percent on 3-pointers as the more realistic goal.

Expectations for Year 1

In an interview over the summer with the Full Court Press on 106.9 The FAN, Brooks opened up on some of the more realistic goals the team has.

Figuring out what constitutes success in the first year of Brooks’ tenure is a bit challenging. Obviously the team wants to win every game and take home the Mountain West title this year. The moment a team doesn’t have these kinds of upper-level goals during the preseason is the day you truly worry about that team.

But there’s also a realistic side of things and a long-term thinking. If you’re grading Brooks on whether his team wins the conference title he’ll almost certainly receive poor marks. Brooks did publicly state a couple of early goals he has for his tenure, the first rungs on the ladder to success. The two specific goals are a pair of things the program has never done – finish top five in the Mountain West standings and get past the second round of the conference tournament (i.e. reach the semifinal).

Whatever the goals and expectations are for Utah State, there’s at least one major thing the Aggies need to have: belief.

“Belief is the biggest thing,” Brooks said. “You have to believe in what we’re doing. Don’t get caught up in the scoreboard, because it’s gonna be ugly. It’s gonna be ugly and we have to believe in the process and we have to let the numbers tell us what’s really going on. So that’s what we have to really focus on, the numbers and the process.”