A new women's basketball season is quickly approaching and the 2009-10 America East Women's Basketball Prospectus is now available for download. The 27-page document is available in PDF format and may take a few minutes to download to your computer.
The America East will debut the conference's first-ever men's and women's basketball Digital Media Guides in partnership with ICS closer to the start of the 2009-10 basketball season.
The 2008-09 season was highlighted by:
- America East placed three teams in the postseason, tying a conference record set in 1999.
- Vermont won the America East Championship and competed in the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2000. Regular-season champion Boston University received a bid to the WNIT and won its first-round game. Hartford appeared in the postseason for the fifth-straight year with a WNIT selection. Both Boston University and Hartford played host to WNIT games, the third-straight season an America East team had hosted a game in the event.
- America East is one of only four non-Football Bowl Subdivision Conferences to have received multiple bids to the postseason in each of the last five years.
- May Kotsopoulos of Vermont was named to the Academic All-District first team presented by ESPN the Magazine and CoSIDA. Brittany Boser of Maine was chosen for the second team.
- Hartford was publicly recognized by the NCAA for its multiyear Academic Progress Rate, finishing among the top 10 percent of the teams in the nation. The Women's Basketball Coaches' Association (WBCA) also named the Hawks to its Top-25 Honor Roll.
The following is some of what's to come during the 2009-10 America East women's basketball season:
- The conference will hold its first-ever America East combined men's and women's championship on the University of Hartford campus from March 4-7, 2010. The conference champion will be crowned the following weekend on the campus of the highest seed remaining.
- Nine All-Conference selections return, including two first-teamers in Hartford's Erica Beverly and Vermont's Courtnay Pilypaitis. Four return as 1,000 career point scorers already (Pilypaitis - 1,482; UMBC's Carlee Cassidy - 1,228; Vermont's May Kotsopoulos - 1,191; Beverly - 1,023).
- Defending Champion Vermont, which won the conference tournament for the first time since 2000, will be hoping to win its sixth title in program history. Along the way, the Catamounts will have an NCAA Tournament rematch with National Champion Connecticut during their non-conference season.
- Other marquee non-conference match-ups include UMBC hosting Virginia on November 13, Hartford and New Hampshire hosting National runner-up Louisville on November 17 and December 22, respectively, Maine welcoming Duke to Orono on December 21 and Boston University crossing town for a rematch with Boston College, the postseason WNIT runner-up, on January 3.
- Beverly was recently named a preseason candidate for the Wooden Award. The award is presented annually to the outstanding collegiate basketball Player of the Year.