by Malcolm Butler
Brooke Stoehr earned the Conference USA Coach of the Year Award announced by the league office on Monday while four Louisiana Tech players received all-conference accolades.
After guiding Louisiana Tech to its first regular season conference title in 15 years, Stoehr was honored by a panel of league head coaches, SIDs, and media members.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Not only did Tech win the title, the Lady Techsters ran away with it.
Seventeen straight CUSA wins, the longest streak in 25 years.
The 5-game margin in the win column over the runner-up (FIU) tied the largest margin of games in the history of Conference USA.
Tech posted a perfect 9-0 record on the road in league games. Undefeated. No other team was better than 6-3 (FIU and Jacksonville State, who by the way, Tech defeated on their home floors).
Twelve of the 17 wins came by double digits. Tech’s margin of victory was over 15 points a game.
But Stoehr is the first one to point to the fact that it was her players that did the work, night in and night out, home and away.
Paris Bradley earned first team honors, while Jianna Morris and Jordan Marshall were named second team all-league. Alexis Weaver was named honorable mention.
But no specialty awards for a team of players that ran away with a regular season league title was the surprise.
Player of the Year? Defensive Player of the Year? Freshman of the Year? Newcomer of the Year? Sixth Player of the Year?
Tech went 0-for the lot of them.
To put this into historical context, the previous five years the league champion has never failed to walk away with at least one superlative award winner for a player. And most of those years the title race was much closer (outside of MTSU winning by 5 games in 2023-24; that year the Blue Raiders had both the Player of the Year and Defensive Player of the Year).
This year, Tech clinched it with two weeks remaining.
Since the 2013-14 season when Louisiana Tech joined the league, this is only the third time the regular season champion hasn’t won at least one player specific specialty award (2017 WKU, 2018 UAB). And both of those years, WKU and UAB at least was rewarded with two first team all-conference honors. This year, Tech had just one (Paris Bradley).
And Tech had plenty of top-notch candidates.
Last year’s Freshman of the Year and this year’s Preseason Player of the Year Paris Bradley was one of only two players in CUSA to rank in the top 15 in scoring, assists and steals. She also ranked in the top 25 in rebounding. Bradley averaged 14.4 points (No. 5), 3.2 assists (No. 7), and 1.9 steals (No. 14) a contest. And for good measure, she pulled down 5.2 rebounds a game (No. 25).
Unselfish. Versatile. Talented. Best player on the best team.
How about Jianna Morris for Defensive Player of the Year? She held Missouri State’s Kaemyn Bekemeier who led CUSA in scoring (17.5 ppg) to a grand total of 14 points in two games. That’s 7.0 points a game.
Morris also got the assignment on FIU’s Parris Atkins, who ranks No. 3 in the league in scoring at 17 points a game. Atkins totaled 24 points and committed 10 turnovers in two games. That’s 12.0 points per contest, well under her average.
That’s four games against two of the top three scorers in CUSA, who averaged just 9.5 points a game, just over half of their average. And in those four games, Morris played 147 of 160 possible minutes.
To make matters more perplexing, not only did Morris not get Defensive Player of the Year, but she wasn’t even voted to the league’s 5-person All-Defensive Team.
Let’s move on to Kaleigh Thompson for 6th Player of the Year. Take away two games in which Thompson didn’t score (she played a total of 27 minutes and took a total of 3 shots in those two games), she averaged right below 9.0 points and 4.3 points a contest in league-only games coming off the bench.
She is one of the toughest match-ups in the league with her size, ball-handling ability, quickness and ability to do so many of the little things that win games.
And what about that lack of representation on the all-Defensive Team, made up of the five “best” defenders in the league.
Louisiana Tech ranked No. 1 as a team in fewest points allowed per game at only 57.7 in league-only games. It ranked No. 3 in turnovers forced per game and No. 3 in opponent 3-point field goal percentage (even after UTEP went nuclear Saturday night when it hit a program record 14 vs. Tech).
The Lady Techsters held their opponent to 60 points or less 13 times. So surely they deserved at least one player on that team. Jianna Morris, perhaps?
At the end of the day, as Tech prepares to open the CUSA Tournament Wednesday in Huntsville, Alabama, the only hardware this team is concerned with is the CUSA Tournament Championship trophy.
And the league coaches, SIDs, and media just gave a group that didn’t need extra motivation … exactly that.
