At various parts of last season, Jeff Harada looked down his bench and counted his substitution options with one hand. This doesn’t sound so bad on its face. Harada had five starters and five subs. Where’s the problem?
No, it doesn’t sound so bad. Until you realize when Harada counted his options, he had fingers to spare.
Three of them, to be exact.
“There were games we had seven healthy players,” the Cal State Fullerton women’s basketball coach said about the 2022-23 season. “We had issues last year. We lost all three of our point guards, and that was tough. It was one of those weird years.”
That Harada and the Titans were in for “one of those weird years” could have been foreshadowed in their Big West Conference opener against UC Santa Barbara. On the first play of the game, 6-foot forward Kathryn Neff went up to contest a shot, came down awkwardly without any contact — and tore her ACL. That deprived the Titans of a minutes-eating inside-outside threat who was 7-for-17 on her 3-pointers in the 10 games she played.
The crystal ball could have foreshadowed it during an October practice when graduate transfer Shyla Latone — whom Harada looked to for major point-guard minutes and scoring — tore her ACL. Latone was expected to replace Lily Wahinekapu, the reigning conference Freshman of the Year, who transferred to Hawaii.
No problem. Right? Harada had Anniken Frey, who didn’t play the 2021-22 season due to nerve damage. But during the 2020-21 season, Frey started all 22 games, averaging 9.2 points and a team-best 3.6 assists per game. Until he didn’t have Frey, who missed all but 12 games battling that recurring medical issue.
And we haven’t mentioned then-freshman Kaliana Salazar-Harrell, who tore her ACL in her last high school game — the Hawaii state title game — in the late winter of 2022. Harada said he’d thought Salazar-Harrell would return for conference play. Instead, she wasn’t ready, and Harada redshirted…
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