The Clan's dominance

As part of a piece on the Simon Fraser Clan's impressive recent run in women's basketball, I put together a look at the regular-season records of all 43 CIS programs since 2001-02 (when Bruce Langford took over at SFU):


Totals W L W%
1 Simon Fraser 123 14 89.8%
2 Laval 89 11 89.0%
3 Memorial 104 24 81.3%
4 UBC 105 32 76.6%
5 Cape Breton 99 31 76.2%
6 McMaster 106 35 75.2%
7 Laurentian 103 36 74.1%
8 Western 101 40 71.6%
9 Brock 95 46 67.4%
10 Regina 90 44 67.2%
11 Toronto 94 46 67.1%
12 Winnipeg 89 45 66.4%
13 York 89 50 64.0%
14 Dalhousie 78 50 60.9%
15 Queen's 82 57 59.0%
16 Bishop's 58 41 58.6%
17 Guelph 82 60 57.7%
18 Calgary 74 60 55.2%
19 Saskatchewan 73 61 54.5%
20 Alberta 72 62 53.7%
21 UNB 69 60 53.5%
22 Laurier 74 67 52.5%
23 Manitoba 69 65 51.5%
24 Victoria 69 68 50.4%
25 Ottawa 61 78 43.9%
26 Saint Mary's 56 72 43.8%
27 Fraser Valley 16 21 43.2%
28 Concordia 41 59 41.0%
29 Waterloo 57 84 40.4%
30 StFX 46 82 35.9%
31 UPEI 43 85 33.6%
32 Ryerson 41 98 29.5%
33 McGill 29 70 29.3%
34 Carleton 40 98 29.0%
35 Lethbridge 38 95 28.6%
36 Windsor 38 102 27.1%
37 Lakehead 37 104 26.2%
38 UQAM 17 52 24.6%
39 TWU 30 106 22.1%
40 Acadia 18 108 14.3%
41 TRU 4 52 7.1%
42 Brandon 4 129 3.0%
43 RMC 0 98 0.0%

Still ranked No. 1 in the country, the Clan are looking to win their fourth national title in seven years, which isn't quite Carleton territory (on the men's side), but still pretty impressive.

And what on earth is going on at Brandon and RMC?

Something to keep in mind is that Canada West is the conference to beat each and every year, as they've won the national title the past 16 years in a row. (Something that makes Simon Fraser's record all the more daunting.)
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3 comments:

  1. Greater minds than I would have to tackle that one, but it probably speaks to the size of the student body at those schools.

    Student life at RMC is pretty demanding too; they've only had a program for a few years. RMC really got into the university league for the men's team, and the women's program was kind of pulled along.

    The latter might be true of BU... they had a women's team b/c they were required to, but never have put a ton into it and no one seems compelled to change that.

    Bottom line, there's no good explanation for being almost winless across several seasons.

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  2. It's not just women's basketball: RMC sports teams are almost uniformly bad (except for fencing), and their women's teams tend to be even worse than the men. In fact, when their women's soccer team upset Queen's in the first round this year, the Queen's athletics staff told me it was the first time an RMC women's team had ever made the playoffs in any sport. When I talked to their athletic director (Darren Cates) earlier this year, he said their struggles are mostly due to their small student body, claiming that more women try out for the University of Toronto's women's soccer team than attend RMC. They have a full slate of full-time coaches, which should help with recruiting, but they also can't offer any athletic scholarships, which hurts. Personally, I think school size is probably the main issue for them, but the rigours of military training may play a part as well: at most schools, athletics are a break from studies, and the long practice hours required for interuniversity sports might be a tougher sell when you're already doing a lot of physical work during the day.

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  3. Guys, the reason why RMC struggles so mightily is because of one very obvious reason: You're trying to recruit to a military college, so the challenges of recruiting there are completely unlike any other school in the nation. You're not just going out to high schools and recruiting kids like York or Guelph (hypothetically) would. I would also argue that, as it relates to this topic, recruiting for the women's team is even that much tougher than recruiting for the men. Finding women who want military careers or jobs as pilots is likely tougher than scrounging together males who do.

    As for Brandon, the team took strides under Les Berry (2003-04) then the program was set back at least 10 years by the mind-blowing hire of Cheryl Kryluk who had three key players quit because of her coaching style (or lack thereof) and alienated two other significant starters and basically didn't ask them back. Try telling a kid to come play for that program. It's baby steps for sure.

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