• Slug: Sports-Basketball Homecoming Roadtrip, 1,200 words.
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By Alex Simon
Cronkite News

TEMPE – No matter how much they will try to make Sunday “just another game,” it will be more than that for Arizona State women’s basketball players Kiara Russell and Jamie Ruden.

It will be a college game at Williams Arena — better known as The Barn — the place where the two seniors from Minnesota grew up watching the Minnesota Golden Gophers.

“We were big fans of the U of M women’s team ever since I was like 4,” said Ruden, who grew up about 75 miles away in Rochester, Minnesota. “We’d go to their games all the time. I’ve always had the dream of playing college basketball, so I’d look up to the U of M women’s team and try to visualize myself playing on a college team like that. So this’ll be really special, to be on the court. I’m really excited about it.”

Russell was a “huge Gopher fan” growing up in Minneapolis, attending or watching games “all the time.”

“Not only when Lindsey Whalen played, but Rachel Banham too, when she scored 60 points,” she said, remembering Banham’s night at Northwestern that Russell likely watched on television when she was a senior in high school. “I was a huge Gopher fan and a Lynx fan when Lindsey Whalen was there, too.”
This will be Sun Devils’ first nonconference road game, but it also represents a recurring ritual of both men’s and women’s college basketball: the game back home for players who attend colleges far from where they grew up.

“That’s something that, when I played at Duke, Coach K always tried to focus on,” Arizona State men’s basketball head coach Bobby Hurley said. “It was something that I took from him that we try, if it makes sense. If we can make it happen, we’ll try and do it.”

Hurley had the opportunity to play multiple times in the New York metropolitan area for Duke, most notably in a game just 10 miles from his Jersey City home against Rutgers during his senior season. The Blue Devils won 88-79 that day, with Hurley contributing 16 points and 11 assists.

In that spirit, the men’s team will head to Uncasville, Connecticut for two games on Nov. 23 and 24, just 60 miles from junior forward Kimani Lawrence’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. The Sun Devils will play in the two-game Air Force Reserve Tip-Off Tournament, taking on St. John’s on Nov. 23 and either Massachusetts or Virginia the next day.

“It’s big. Even in high school, I never really got to play at home a lot because I went to a boarding school,” Lawrence said. “Coach Hurley making sure we get a couple games back home was big for me. It’s going to be nice to get to play in front of my family, in front of people that haven’t seen me play in a couple of years.”

Hurley and the men’s team played Georgia in Athens last season to provide a homecoming game for Romello White, a redshirt junior forward from Atlanta. In Lawrence’s eyes, these games offer a chance for the team to find a different motivating point.

“We wanted to play good and win for Romello because he’s at home,” Lawrence said. “We wanted to make a good impression for his family at home. I’m sure it’ll be the same way with me. It just gives us even more of a reason to play hard.”

These games combine two extremely difficult aspects of a college program’s tenets in scheduling and recruiting. Hurley said that he and others in the program “talk about doing everything in our power” to get these games scheduled, which can happen a year (often more) in advance of the game.

It’s a struggle that women’s basketball head coach Charli Turner Thorne just experienced in trying to schedule the game at Minnesota. It led the Sun Devils to a creative solution when it appeared they had hit a permanent road block.

“The former coach at Minnesota wouldn’t schedule us,” Turner Thorne said. “So last year, we played at Wisconsin-La Crosse and faced Kansas State. We created an event so Kiki and Jamie’s families could come see them play. And then there was a coaching change. … Once [Minnesota] switched coaches, we immediately called them and they immediately scheduled us.”

The Sun Devils won the game last year in La Crosse, which is about 2.5 hours from Minneapolis (with Rochester about halfway in between), but Turner Thorne knows that for two Minnesota kids, there’s nothing that compares to playing at The Barn.

“This is their home home,” Turner Thorne said. “Wisconsin-La Crosse was close, but this is gonna be really fun for them, and really challenging for our team. When you bring a team home, you want to represent. So it’ll be a fun challenge for everybody.”

There is another layer to Sunday’s game for Ruden and Russell. They were both big fans of current Minnesota head coach Lindsay Whalen, who starred for both the Gophers and the Minnesota Lynx of the WNBA. Both said that seeing Turner Thorne and the staff work so hard to get this game on the schedule and fulfilling that part of the recruiting pitch is sincerely appreciated.

“Charli is an amazing coach for doing something like this,” Russell said. “Not a lot of coaches would actually do this for their players, and she stuck to her word. She actually made this place feel like a second home to me, too. It’s just amazing that she can give me this opportunity to play at home.”

With between 30 and 50 people expected to attend the game in support of her on Sunday, Ruden said, “When [Turner Thorne] was recruiting and promised me that, I thought that was really special because it shows her care for families. She really cares about who we are as people, so she loves our families and supports our families. I think it’s really special that we’re making this happen — and it’s our senior year, too.”

Turner Thorne has scheduled these games multiple times over her 23 years at Arizona State. A notable recent example was the 2014 game at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois to give former Sun Devils Sophie Brunner and Katie Hempen a game in their native state during their senior season. While the coach doesn’t want Russell and Ruden to get overly excited about a homecoming game like this, she believes that saving these games for later in a player’s career helps them have a better handle on their emotions.

“I always talk to them about it because I don’t care who you are, it’s hard to not be a little bit distracted when your loved ones are there and they’re not normally there,” Turner Thorne said. “But these guys are veterans and they’ve been in super tough game environments, so I think they’ll be okay.”

The fact that Minnesota is a formidable opponent (just outside the AP Top 25) helped Russell put a plan in place to keep her focus on the game and not the 50 or so people she anticipates will attend the game to support her.

“I actually told my family I don’t want to see them until after the game because I’ve got to take care of business first,” she said. “But I’m excited. I’m super stoked and I’m ready to go home.”

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