CLOUD HAS SILVER LINING

By Pete Mollica

Although YSU women are 1-6, LeFleur is off to best start

The senior is averaging 8.8 points and 8.6 rebounds and leads the league in shooting percentage.

YOUNGSTOWN — The Youngstown State women’s basketball team has won just one of five games this season, and in that game Nikita LaFleur scored 24 points and pulled down 17 rebounds.

She hopes she doesn’t need to do that for the Penguins to win again.

The 6-foot-2 senior forward from Scarborough, Ontario, is off to the best start in the four years that she’s played at YSU.

She is averaging 8.8 points and 8.6 rebounds per game and is shooting a Horizon League best 64 percent from the field.

“I don’t think that I have to score that many or get that many rebounds for us to win again, but I do think that I need to have that same sort of effort that I had in that game,” LaFleur said.

LaFleur said that her big game, which came in the opening round of the Pitt Thanksgiving Tournament last Friday against Weber State, a 67-60 win, was the result of a complete team effort.

“Everybody did their job in that game,” she said. “I got some great feeds from our guards and we rebounded better. It was just an all-around complete team effort.”

It has taken this team longer to come together. The Penguins have some new faces on the roster and some of the returning veterans have been bogged down by injuries.

“We were just talking about it this morning about how much better things are getting and how we would love to have a couple of those early games back now to play,” said LaFleur.

First-year coach Cindy Martin was very happy with the way the Penguins played against Weber State, which she feels was a better team than many the Penguins had lost to earlier in the year.

“It was a very good win and a good win will do wonders for the program,” Martin said.

She also praised the play of LaFleur.

“With the injuries and the new faces, she is the one who needs to step up and take the lead and she did that against Weber State,” Martin said. “We’re getting better and we’ve said all along that our goal is to be ready by January when the Horizon League play begins.”

In five games this season LaFleur has scored 44 points, second only on the team to senior Tiara Scott who has 45. It is almost as many points as she scored all of last season. Playing in 26 games she scored just 56 points. She also more than halfway to her best rebounding total, which was 119 in 2006-07 as a sophomore.

“We are nowhere near where we need to be this season,” said LaFleur. “We have a lot of work to do both offensively and defensively and there are a lot of individual things that each of us need to improve on, but as we keep working hard those things are going to come and hopefully by January.”

LaFleur came to the Penguins in 2005 from Mother Teresa High School.

“One of the reasons I came here was to be closer to my sister, Tiffany,” she said. “She was playing at Kent State a year before I got here and we were only about 40 miles apart and that was nice.”

mollica@vindy.com