Kentucky WBB's selfless lineup is an offensive force to be reckoned with

On Monday, Kentucky Women’s Basketball defeated USC Upstate 98-43 to open the 2024-25 season. In what will be a season of “firsts,” Monday’s game was new head coach Kenny Brooks‘ first coaching the ‘Cats. It was also his first game in Memorial Coliseum and his first Kentucky Women’s Basketball win.

It was also his first time coaching this specific group of girls.

While he had coached Georgia Amoore, Clara Strack, and his daughter Gabby before, there are plenty of players on the roster he’d never had the pleasure of coaching until this season. It’s clear, however, that one of Brooks’ main focuses this season is ball movement. In the win over the Spartans, Kentucky totaled 26 assists, Amoore dishing out 10 of them.

The other 16 came from a combination of seven other players. Teonni Key finished with five. Dazia Lawrence, Strack, Amelia Hassett, Lexi Blue, and Clara Silva each had two. Finally, Cassidy Rowe rounded out the assists with one of her own. Out of the 11 players that hit the floor, eight of them added at least one assist to the stat sheet, making it obvious that Brooks stresses the importance of finding the open woman on the court.

“That’s my job. Point blank period, as the point guard,” Amoore said in the post-game press conference. “You know, I can score. I can be aggressive. And there’ll be games this year where, you know, the balances will change. But, I love sharing with my teammates.“

“If you go back and you and you charted her, her production is always low from a point standpoint,” Brooks said regarding the point guard. “The first eight, 10 games, we talked about it. We talked about it a lot, and it’s because she wants to facilitate. She wants to get everybody else going,”

If we’ve learned anything from Monday’s matchup, it’s that Brooks loves a facilitator, and Amoore loves to be that person for him. Just like she said, her job as a point guard is to find the open spots, and she did just that. A selfless style of play is fun to watch, and it seems like this team is going to be doing just that.

Up next, Kentucky takes on Northern Kentucky University at Memorial Coliseum on Thursday, Nov. 7 at 6:00 p.m. EST. Hopefully, we’ll be seeing way more of this selfless style of play.

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