Lady Toppers basketball showered with preseason honors

The following news should come as no surprise, but I’m going to tell you anyway; three members of the Lady Toppers basketball team have been named to Conference USA’s preseason All-Conference team, and one was named as the preseason Player of the Year.

Chastity Gooch, Alexis Govan and Kendall Noble were all named to the preseason All-Conference squad, and Gooch was named preseason Player of the Year. If you’ll recall, last year, Govan was selected to the same title, but played just under half the season after going down with a leg injury.

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Gooch finished last season with an average of 18.4 points and nine rebounds, and moved into the top 20 in WKU history in scoring and top 10 in rebounds and blocked shots. Gooch has won the Sun Belt Conference Defensive Player of the Year award in each of the last two seasons, and enters her first season in C-USA as the leading active career points scorer, and is just one of four players in the league with over 1,000 career points.

Govan played all of 11 games last year, but did shoot over 43% from the field and complied 4.6 rebounds per game. Her final game played was a memorable one, a 16-point comeback win against Georgetown in Puerto Rico.

Kendall Noble had a breakout year last year after missing all of her true freshman year with an ACL injury. Last year, Noble averaged at least 10 points and five boards during conference play, and helped dish out 96 assists and collected 76 steals. Noble really made her presence known when it was needed the most after Govan went down.

The danger of the Lady Tops was shown not only in the All-Conference team, but also the preseason poll as well. WKU was voted to finish second in the conference, right behind the MTBR’s, and had one less first-place vote than the Raiders with five. WKU also is the only school to have multiple members on the All-Conference team, and are joined by Lefty Webster of Charlotte, Louisiana Tech’s Whitney Frazier, MTBR’s Olivia Jones, Southern Miss’ Tamara Jones and Chelsee Black of UAB.

The three-headed monster of Gooch, Govan and Noble is probably the best on the Hill. I feel 100% confident in saying that WKU can start the game with 30 points on the board, as each player is nearly guaranteed a multi-point game.

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