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Bakersfield College women's basketball players Julie Hernandez, left front, and Kathy Rodriguez, right front, signed with New England College at a ceremony on campus Monday. They were joined by coaches Kel Dean and Paula Dahl.
Angie Gonzalez also signed with La Verne during Monday's event at BC
Former Ridgeview and CSUB standout Justin McCall has signed to play professional basketball in Poland for GTK Gliwice.
Bakersfield College women's basketball players Julie Hernandez, left front, and Kathy Rodriguez, right front, signed with New England College at a ceremony on campus Monday. They were joined by coaches Kel Dean and Paula Dahl.
Angie Gonzalez also signed with La Verne during Monday's event at BC
Former Ridgeview and CSUB standout Justin McCall has signed to play professional basketball in Poland for GTK Gliwice.
As an epilogue to a 2021-22 season that featured the Renegades’ first playoff appearance in seven years, the Bakersfield College women’s basketball team hosted a signing ceremony Monday for three former McFarland High players moving on to four-year colleges: Angie Gonzalez, Julie Hernandez and Kathy Rodriguez.
The point guard Gonzalez started all 26 games for BC last season and will be moving on to the NCAA Division III University of La Verne. She averaged 6.1 points, 5.0 rebounds and a team-leading 5.9 assists per game.
Hernandez, a volume shooter who played three years for the Renegades, posted 12.2 points and 8.1 rebounds per game, with a career-high 27-point game in a December win over Reedley. She also added a team-high 2.2 steals per game from her guard spot. Hernandez will be attending New England College, a fellow D-III school in Henniker, N.H.
Also heading to Henniker is her teammate Rodriguez. Rodriguez was a double-double machine and a force on the glass, announcing her presence early in the year with an 18-point, 21-rebound game. She averaged 15.1 points per game on 55.1 percent shooting.
Without that trio — three of the top four in minutes per game last season — Paula Dahl’s squad is set to look a lot different this year.
Call to action: Justin McCall, the leading scorer for Cal State Bakersfield during the 2021-22 men’s basketball season and the only player to start every game for the Roadrunners, has signed with GTK Gliwice, a top-level basketball club in Poland. By traveling overseas to play professional, he follows in the footsteps of older sister Erica McCall, who has played in Hungary and Turkey, recently signed with Perfumerías Avenida in Spain and hosts a podcast about international basketball. Justin McCall isn’t the first recent CSUB graduate to seek playing opportunities beyond the U.S., as teammate Shawn Stith played in Colombia during April and May.
Sunny side of the valley: Taft College will be looking for a new softball coach for next season. Gaby Brixey, who led the Cougars for five seasons with a record of 43-100, has left to take the same job at West Hills College Coalinga. Brixey grew up in Coalinga, played for the Falcons and entered their Hall of Fame as a center fielder. She served as an assistant coach under Staci Mosher for five years before getting the Taft job and now come home to take over a program that did not play last season. Brixey will now face her former team in Central Valley Conference competition.
Komet sighted: The Bakersfield Condors and Fort Wayne Komets now have something in common — besides Colin Chaulk, the new Condors head coach who played 687 games in 10 seasons with the Komets and had his number retired (initially hanging upside down in the rafters, due to a logistical error). Now both Bakersfield and Fort Wayne will be united by their affiliation with the Edmonton Oilers. Edmonton replaced the Wichita Thunder as its ECHL affiliate with the Komets and will now send its third-tier players to Fort Wayne. The Komets had been left without a partner after the Vegas Golden Knights swapped their affiliation to the new Savannah Ghost Pirates. Now Wichita has been cut loose. Five NHL markets currently lack ECHL affiliation: Los Angeles, San Jose, St. Louis, Vancouver and Winnipeg.
In the meantime, the Oilers continue to shuffle their offseason roster, with effects reverberating through the organization. The Condors have retained most of their personnel from last season, although according to the team’s online player tracker, three players signed in Europe (Filip Berglund, Ilya Konovalov and Ostap Safin) and two with other domestic teams (Adam Cracknell and Cooper Marody), and five more became free agents.
Other notes: Stockdale golfer Manik Anand, an incoming sophomore, fresh off finishing seventh in his age group at the Future Champions Golf world junior competition, is slated to compete in the Bakersfield City Championships this weekend … CSUB baseball added the services of a pair of transfers: infielder Walker Moore (Northwest Nazarene) and catcher Matthew Lee (Louisiana-Monroe) … former CSUB wrestlers John Azevedo, Adam Cuestas, Dan Cuestas and Joe Gonzalez are slated for induction into the NCAA Division II Hall of Fame Saturday … Two soccer transfers out of CSUB appear to have landed at new destinations for this season: Niall Owens (men’s soccer, Palm Beach Atlantic) and Amber Jensen (women’s soccer, Fresno Pacific) … former Bakersfield College offensive lineman Jaron Marshall has moved from Abilene Christian to Mississippi Valley State as a graduate transfer.
Reporter Henry Greenstein can be reached at 661-395-7374. Follow him on Twitter: @HenryGreenstein.
Positive Cases Among Kern Residents: 269,826
Recovered and Presumed Recovered Residents: 254,207
Percentage of all cases that are unvaccinated: 73.05
Percentage of all hospitalizations that are unvaccinated: 83.34
Source: Kern County Public Health Services Department