By Christopher Machnich
Gilbert Arenas used his team facilities as a gun locker. Tiger Woods had very public affairs; about fourteen of them, and by the time you read this that number could have doubled. Plaxico Burress shot himself in the leg in a New York night club.
Athletes behaving badly are nothing new to the 21st century sports scene, and no team is immune from this trend. The CCSU women’s basketball team had to find this out the hard way.
In late January Shontice Simmons and Gabrielle Oglesby allegedly stole laptops from Kate Lang and Allison Rasile, two members of the CCSU swim team. Simmons and Oglesby were arrested on two counts of burglary in the third degree and one count of larceny in the third degree.
It’s hard not to be overtaken by visions of A.J. Price and Marcus Williams.
Have athletes-especially those in Connecticut- not learned from watching Price and Williams, two of the University of Connecticut’s star players, get arrested and miss an entire season for stealing laptops?
To make matters stranger, Simmons and Oglesby supposedly stole these laptops while staying in Carroll Hall over winter break. With only a limited number of athletes staying at Carroll, there aren’t many suspects.
CCSU handled the situation as best it could by limiting the information that got to the media.
Despite the negative attention these alleged crimes garnered for CCSU, there is a silver lining. It made for a more efficient Central Connecticut women’s basketball team.
Statistically it’s impossible to deny.
Oglesby got off to a slow start, but seemed to come around when she scored 14 points against NJIT in December. It’s hard to say what could have been.
Simmons created what I like to call “The Nate Robinson Effect.” Both Simmons and the former New York Knick, Nate Robinson, are great athletes who always demand defensive attention. Robinson can drop 30 points on a given night and Simmons tallied 19 points against Brown, but with both athletes come an unreasonable amount of field goal attempts and dangerously low percentages from the field.
Robinson started the year off with a .286 field goal percentage and shot .200 from the three point line.
In the eleven games played by Simmons, nine of which she started, she averaged a field goal percentage of .292 and from three shot .273. Simmons also had a two game stretch against Rhode Island and Long Island where she combined for 6-29 from the field and 0-13 from three.
The most telling similarity between these two athletes is this: their teams play better when they aren’t in the line up.
After an abysmal start by the New York Knicks (4-14), Coach Mike D’Antoni sat Robinson for the month of December, resulting in a 9-6 record.
The Blue Devils started the season with three wins and eight losses. After Simmons was dismissed the team went 8-9. Not a great record, but defiantly an improvement. With out Simmons getting minutes the women’s team was able to get the ball to its more consistent players.
The athletes on the women’s team deserve an extraordinary amount of credit for playing through the negative media attention.
Leanne Crockett shot .394 from the field, drained over a third of her shots from three, and averaged nearly nine rebounds a game. Kerianne Dugan averaged 12 points a game, a team high, and seven rebounds. Justina Udenze gave the women’s team a presence in the paint with a .495 field goal percentage. Emily Rose held down the bench like Eddie House- the Boston Celtics version- shooting .339 from beyond three and averaged 12 points per 40 minutes of basketball.
Oglesby has applied for accelerated rehabilitation, a form a probation that would erase her record of the crimes. AR is allowed if the culprit is a first time offender. Hopefully Simmons has a clean record and can also apply for AR. A senseless act committed when you’re 19 should not follow you around for the rest of your life. I wish them both the best of luck and commend the CCSU women’s basketball team for playing through a strange season.