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Message: [QUOTE="awhom111, post: 4664730, member: 8683"] Different parts are on the players and on the college coaches. Setting that professional goal early is important when evaluating programs for college. DiDi Richards apparently said to the media early in her career that she was unaware that the WNBA even existed until Kalani Brown was drafted, which I somewhat find hard to believe. Even if I can buy that Baylor was not highlighting their reasonable number of professional players, no other coach recruiting her tried to sell their WNBA success stories to a highly rated recruit? Obviously the UConn WNBA history speaks for itself, but plenty of other programs also have a track record of helping players start professional careers of some kind. At Duke, every entering freshman from 2006 to 2014 who finished their college career without severe injury limitations played professional basketball for at least a little while and that 2015 player went straight into other positions in the basketball universe. That streak could start up again through the 2018 group, but my other main takeaway is that we had a lot of players have their careers ended by injury. Players need to take the initiative on continuing to work on areas of their game that they will need later, but not necessarily in college, like extending their shooting range each offseason. Conditioning, especially for that WNBA training camp so soon after the college season is also something that they can control. Based on some of the responses to the roster crunch, it also seems like a good idea for them to seek out WNBA players, especially veteran or retired ones who are not having their spots threatened by younger players to get an idea of the mental step up that is required for playing at a higher level. Also based on comments from WNBA players, it sounds like there are a lot of college programs that are not using common terminology or running such unstructured offenses that some rookies are not able to run basic sets or run plays on verbal instructions without having a diagram. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach