Brock’s inside presence
Sofia Croce has gone from an afterthought to being a key member of the Brock women’s basketball team heading to this week’s U SPORTS championship in Ottawa.
The 21-year-old Oakville native, who played one minute of the first game of the season, was on the floor for 24 minutes in the OAU quarter-final win over Windsor and 33 minutes in both the OUA semifinal and final victories over Western and Ryerson.
“Sofia has come a long way and she is our mainstay in the post,” Brock head coach Mike Rao said. “We’re working with her and if she scores a bit more we will be more of a threat, but she boards well, she’s a hard-nosed player, she understands the game and we need her.
“She is an inside presence.”
The former travel player with the Burlington Force, Oakville Venom and Oakville Vytis earned her minutes the old-fashioned way.
“It was showing in practice that I deserve it,” the fourth-year concurrent education student said. “It also has a lot to do with my other teammates giving me confidence because coming in as a walk-on last year I really didn’t have that confidence and there was already a starter.
“I was in the background a little bit but there were a couple of games last year where I got to show that I could actually play as a starter.”
Croce didn’t try out for the Brock team until last year.
“I took two years off of basketball to work on fitness and then I tried out.”
With Rao taking over the team late in 2018, Croce wasn’t sure she was going to try out but she emailed him the night before tryouts started.
“It was a very last-minute thing, but for the two years that I was training, my end goal was to make the team.”
Rao is the perfect coach for her.
“He always emphasizes effort which is always been a big thing for me. I am the one who is always diving on the floor and I might not be the best skill-wise, but I give it a 110 per cent and it’s my aggressive behaviour that usually sparks something.”
Croce worked hard last summer to prepare for the 2019-20 campaign. It paid off as she averaged 6.2 points and 6.1 rebounds per game during the regular season.
“This past summer was huge for me,” she said. “I stayed here the entire summer to work on fitness, conditioning and all that stuff which was big because we play at such a high level here.”
She has also spent a lot of time during the season training with Rao and the other coaches on individual skills.
“That’s really important for finishing my touches,” she said. “He also focuses on dribbling and the fundamentals of every other skill.”
At 5-foot-10, Croce is far from the prototypical post player, but she loves the physical play in the paint.
“It’s showing that I have heart. Height doesn’t matter,” she said. “I have guarded 6-foot-4 girls and it is hard, but I do it.”
Croce enjoys banging bodies down low and setting screens.
“I think it helped that in high school I played rugby,” she said, with a laugh. “That was a huge factor and I have always been the one that sets a screen because that’s my job in certain situations.”
Croce takes her job seriously.
“I look for the contact first and some of the bigs we played this year were caught off guard by how aggressive I am,” she said. “It keeps them on their toes, for sure.”
Many an unsuspecting player has been rocked by Croce screen.
“I have had to work on not getting offensive (foul) calls because I sometimes look for the contact a little too much.”
She is not sure if she will be back next year because she will be in teachers college so this might be her one and only crack at the nationals.
“We have to take advantage of every experience. Bob Davis talked to us and told us to soak it all in because no one expected us to be there,” she said. “We were truly the underdogs. Now that were here we just have to play and Rao is telling us to enjoy the moment and enjoy the games because sometimes it is the only chance you will get.”
Second-seeded Brock opens play in Ottawa against seventh-seeded Calgary Thursday at 3 p.m.
