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Rice Basketball Preseason Conference Polls Released

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Preseason polls for both the Rice Basketball men’s and women’s teams were released on Friday with very different projections for the Owls’ two squads.

Rice Men’s Basketball was picked to finish 13th in the AAC in their first year under head coach Rob Lanier. Rice women’s basketball were tabbed to finish second in a tie with North Texas following a Conference Championship Title and NCAA appearance by head coach Lindsay Edmonds. Senior forward Malia Fisher was named a first-team all conference selection.

Both polls and all-conference selections are as follows:

2024-25 American Athletic Conference Women’s Basketball Preseason Poll and Honors

1. South Florida (8) 135
2. North Texas (3) 124
Rice (2) 124
4. Tulsa 98
5. UTSA 96
6. East Carolina 91
7. Memphis 84
8. Temple 78
9. UAB 55
10. Tulane 40
11. Charlotte 38
12. Wichita State 32
13. Florida Atlantic 19

Preseason Players of the Year

Tommisha Lampkin, Gr., F, North Texas

Romi Levy, R-Sr., F, South Florida

Preseason All-Conference First Team

Tommisha Lampkin, Gr., F, North Texas

Malia Fisher, Sr., F, Rice

Romi Levy, R-Sr., F, South Florida

Jordyn Jenkins, R-Sr., F, UTSA

Delanie Crawford, Sr., G, Tulsa

Preseason All-Conference Second Team

Amiya Joyner, Jr., F, East Carolina

Vittoria Blasigh, So., G, South Florida

Mama Dembele, Gr., G, South Florida

Tiarra East, Sr., G, Temple

Kyren Whittington, R-Sr., G, Tulane

2024-25 American Athletic Conference Men’s Basketball Preseason Poll and Honors

1. UAB (9) 141
2. Memphis (4) 136
3. South Florida 108
4. Wichita State 102
5. Florida Atlantic 97
6. Temple 86
7. North Texas 83
8. Charlotte 65
9. East Carolina 63
10. Tulsa 44
11. UTSA 35
Tulane 35
13. Rice 18

Preseason Player of the Year

Yaxel Lendeborg, Sr., F, UAB

Preseason Freshman of the Year

Jared Harris, G, Memphis

Preseason All-Conference First Team

Yaxel Lendeborg, Sr., F, UAB*

RJ Felton, Sr., G, East Carolina

PJ Haggerty, R-So., G, Memphis

Tyrese Hunter, Sr., G, Memphis

Jamal Mashburn Jr., Gr., G, Temple

Preseason All-Conference Second Team

Efrem ‘Butta’ Johnson, Jr., G, UAB

Alejandro Vasquez, Sr., G, UAB

KyKy Tandy, Gr., G, Florida Atlantic

Colby Rogers, R-Sr., G, Memphis

Jayden Reid, So., G, South Florida

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Rice Soccer, Basketball and more bring good news: September 2024 Q&A

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The 2024 Rice Football season has taken a turn for the worse, but Rice Soccer, basketball and more offer hope for the future. We look at both in this month’s subscriber Q&A.

Understandably, good news was the order of the day after things went south with Rice Football. Fortunately, it’s been a very active fall sports season with highlights from Rice Soccer’s tremendous start to accolades for Genny Volpe and expectations for sports yet to start like Swimming and Basketball. This update focuses on the good news from those sports. We’ll dig into the football woes elsewhere.

Questions were edited briefly for clarity. Want to get your questions answered? Subscribe on Patreon for our monthly mailbag.

For those checking in for the first time, or those returning, a quick programming note. Special features like this are reserved for our subscribers. Have questions? You can get those answered in our monthly Q&As and get access to all practice notes, recruiting updates and features like this one when you subscribe on Patreon today.

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Q: I’ve given up on football. Give me some good news on the Rice Athletics front. What else is there to look forward to this year?

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Rice Women’s Basketball falls short at LSU in NCAA Tournament

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Rice Women’s Basketball pushed LSU to the wire, dropping a hard-fought game to the defending champs in the First Round of the NCAA Tournament.

A sea of frustrated purple and gold clan onlookers bemoaned a season-low first quarter point total for the defending national champion LSU Tigers following a physical battle with Rice Women’s basketball in the opening stanza of their NCAA Tournament game. The Owls held the Tigers to 12 points, and while they only managed six themselves, it was evident from the start they were going to give LSU all they had.

“Once we got over that first punch that they threw, we absolutely hung with them,” Malia Fisher said. “I think it was just about playing our brand of basketball and hitting shots early to spread their defense out and then being aggressive, and like I said, not being scared and taking it to them.”

Even when LSU went on a 10-2 run, Rice never looked rattled. The Owls weathered the storm, staying vigilant on defense and got key shots in key moments, many of them coming from the long range of Emily Klaczek whose final three of the first half silenced a full house at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center in Baton Rogue.

More: Potential head coach candidates for Rice men’s basketball

Despite being heavy underdogs, Rice never looked rattled. In the waning moments of the third quarter an 11-2 run put LSU up by 11, their largest lead of the game. Malia Fisher spent most of that time on the bench, struggling with foul trouble, yet the Owls battled back with Destiny Jackson leading the charge and Hailey Adams knocking down some big free throws along the way.

“I can’t hear myself think,” Fisher joked afterward, noting how the environment wasn’t too much for this team. Even with the noise, Rice pushed back.

That 11-point deficit dwindled as the fourth quarter progressed. Sussy Ngulefac’s layup with 1:56 got Rice within six points. The Owls wouldn’t get any closer than that, watching the clock wind down after a hard-fought battle against a battled-tested LSU team.

Final Box | LSU 70 – Rice 60

What They’re Saying

“I’m incredibly proud to be their coach. We came in here and we wanted to have the exact same mindset that we had in the conference tournament and that was to come in and play our best brand of basketball and to not quit and to not give up and be relentless… I’m incredibly proud. We came in here. We fought for four quarters. We won two of those quarters against the defending national champion. I thought we did a lot of great things, but the main thing that I’m proud of is that we never for one second quit or looked like we didn’t believe that we belonged in this game. Very, very proud. I don’t know if I can say that enough.”” – Head coach Lindsay Edmonds

Key takeaway | Poise under pressure

Strip away the seeds and the fanfare. If you handed a copy of this game to someone who didn’t know LSU was the defending national champions and Rice women’s basketball had only earned their ticket to play in the dance a week ago, Friday’s result wouldn’t have given many clues.

LSU turned the ball over 24 times. They shot 42 percent from the field and never led by more than 11 points, despite being nearly a 30-point favorite by most oddsmakers.

Rice won on the margins. They got to loose balls and never let effort be the differentiator between success and failure. For 40 minutes, it looked like the Owls wanted it more than the Tigers. In the end, LSU’s edge in athleticism and height — they outrebounded Rice 42-29 — proved decisive. But not once did it ever seem as if the Owls would go down without a fight.

“We were not afraid of the moment and we were ready to play. We proved that we were here and we were not going to just be somebody that they were going to be able to run over or walk all over,” head coach Lindsay Edmonds said. “And that was because of their unwavering belief in one another and their unwavering confidence in our gameplan and what we were trying to get accomplished today.”

The 2023-2024 Rice women’s basketball season comes to an end in Baton Rouge, but the showing was about as impressive as it could have been in a loss. The unflappable Owls will be back. They’re already charting a course for another trip to the dance next year.

“We talked about it in the locker room. Remember this feeling. Remember what it felt like to get here but next year we want to go further,” Edmonds said. “Everything matters. We’ve already started talking about that. And I think everybody’s going to be hungry.”

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14-Seed Rice Women’s Basketball to face LSU in 2024 NCAA Tournament

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Rice Women’s Basketball has earned a 14-Seed in the 2024 NCAA Tournament and will open up against 3-Seed LSU in Baton Rouge.

For the first time since 2019, Rice Women’s Basketball is going dancing. The Owls clinched an automatic berth in the 2024 NCAA Tournament when they cut down the nets this week in Forth Worth, TX, winning the American Conference Championship. They found out their postseason destination on Selection Sunday:

Rice will be the No. 14 Seed in the Albany 2 Region where they’ll face 3-Seed LSU in the first round. Should the Owls pull off the upset and advance beyond that, they’ll play the winner of 6-Seed Louisville and 11-Seed MTSU.

Rice and LSU will tip off Friday at 3:00 pm. The game will be televised on ESPN

This is the Owls’ fourth trip to the NCAA Tournament in program history and head coach Lindsay Edmonds has become the only Rice women’s basketball head coach to reach the tournament in their first three seasons with the school.

The Owls’ first appearance as a program came in 2000 when the 13-Seed Owls upset 4-Seed UC Santa Barbara in the first round. They then advanced to the second round and fell to 5-Seed North Carolina. Their second trip came in 2005 as an 11-Seed where they fell to 6-Seed Georgia in the first round.

Erica Ogwumike and Nancy Mulkey headlined the most recent Rice Women’s Basketball team to go dancing. That squad was a 12-Seed, pitted against 5-Seed Marquette in the first round. That team dropped a close overtime contest and was denied another chance at the tournament when the 2020 postseason was canceled with the outbreak of COVID-19.

The complete bracket is available here.

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Rice Women’s Basketball routs ECU, wins AAC Championship

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Rice Women’s Basketball is headed to the NCAA Tournament, routing East Carolina to win the Owls’ first-ever American Conference Championship.

Any concerns that Rice women’s basketball would be out of gas as they walked onto the court for their fourth game in as many games dwindled in a matter of minutes as the Owls executed a defensive masterclass. They held ECU to 1-of-12 (8.3 percent) shooting in the opening quarter, setting the tone for one of their most dominant performances of the season.

“We put our foot down,” head coach Lindsay Edmonds, exclaimed. “I mean, seriously. We wanted this. We talked about how our opponent was going to be hungry, we needed to be starving. We were starving to get this win.”

The score was 18-3 in favor of the blue and grey by the end of the first. ECU didn’t reach double digits until halfway through the second frame. It was then that Emily Klaczek congratulated the Pirates with a three, her third of the game, to lift the Owls back to a 17-point advantage. Maya Bokunewicz drilled another at the buzzer to make sure Rice went into halftime up by that same margin.

More: Takeaways from first week Rice Football spring practice 

The Pirates engineered an 8-1 run just after halftime to get back within 14. Klaczek responded with another three, the Owls’ eighth of the game, silencing the threat and keeping Rice in firm command.

ECU’s last gasp came in the fourth quarter, trimming the Rice lead to nine as the Owls managed just one field foal in the first six minutes. Malia Fisher, who had been limited with foul trouble, ended the Pirates’ prayers with a crucial three, putting Rice back in front by double-digits. ECU wouldn’t get any closer for the remainder of the game.

Sussy Ngulefac led Rice with 15 points and her first career double-double with the Owls. Klaczek had 14. Fisher had 13. Destiny Jackson had 10. When it mattered most, the Owls’ stars took charge and willed them to the NCAA Tournament.

“It’s pretty surreal. It’s amazing,” Edmonds said. “I don’t even know if it’s completely all sunk in yet, but we’re going dancing. And there’s more to come for Rice women’s basketball this season.”

Final Box | Rice 61 – ECU 41

What They’re Saying

“We always break the season into three different seasons — non-conference, conference and then tournament play — When we started tournament season, we started breaking down huddles with our left hand because it was closest to our hearts and I just feel like we played with so much heart. We played with so much toughness. We played with so much togetherness. It was it was really special. We hung our hats on defense. We shared the basketball.

I just can’t get over how close this group is on and off the floor and that’s what makes us be so special. Malia [Fisher] said that we might have been a 10 seed on paper but we never believed that we were. So that’s why we we had something to prove and we did it for four straight days, which is really really hard to do, but they were relentless and they knew that they wanted it and they weren’t going to do let anybody take that from them.” – Head coach Lindsay Edmonds

Key takeaway | Defense, it is

The last time Rice women’s basketball played in the NCAA Tournament was following the 2018-2019 season. That team, coached by Tina Langley and featuring Erica Ogwumike and Nancy Mulkey, was as defensively-minded of a basketball team as there has been in quite some time. They held opponents to a staggering 52.9 points per game.

When Lindsay Edmonds took the helm in 2021, the tempo ticked upward and the shots started flying. The Owls have been an offense-first team ever since, or at least, that was the case right up until a few weeks ago when injuries and late-season shooting struggles forced this team to adapt.

“It starts with our mentality and our mindset. We’ve just been saying one more stop, one more rebound,” Edmonds said. “It was just a mentality. I feel like everybody bought into it. Everyone locked into that. It was tremendous. It was everything we needed it to be.”

This team allowed 64.1 points per game in the regular season. In four AAC Tournament games, Rice had held their opponents in 53.3 points per game, fractional points off the torrid pace set by that 2018-2019 squad. When you account for the painstakingly slow tempo of Langley’s squads, it’s remarkable just how stout this current iteration of the Rice defense has become.

If you want to win in March, you have to be elite at something. As improbable as it might have been a few weeks ago, this team is going to hang its hat on defense. It just might work.

Up Next: NCAA Tournament

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