Sabrina Ionescu employed as Geese’ director of athletic tradition

New York Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu, the No. 1 choose within the 2020 WNBA draft, has taken an offseason job together with her alma mater, the Oregon Geese, as director of athletic tradition.

Geese girls’s basketball coach Kelly Graves introduced the part-time workers place Friday. He stated Ionescu will assist with student-athlete improvement and domesticate Graves’ 5 pillars: ardour, integrity, unity, thankfulness and servanthood.

“Sabrina exemplifies what it means to be an Oregon Duck and he or she represents the whole lot our program is about,” Graves stated of Ionescu, who set an NCAA report with 26 triple-doubles at Oregon. “Even in only a part-time capability, she may have the flexibility to make an instantaneous impression on our student-athletes and our program as an entire. She really is a basketball icon that can be capable of join and develop our gamers off the court docket.”

Ionescu led the Geese to the ladies’s Closing 4 in 2019, and Oregon gained the 2020 Pac-12 event and was favored to make a return journey to the Closing 4 earlier than the NCAA event was canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Ionescu is the one participant in NCAA historical past with no less than 2,000 factors, 1,000 rebounds and 1,000 assists in her faculty profession.

She missed most of her WNBA rookie season in 2020 after struggling a extreme ankle harm in her third sport. Ionescu averaged 11.7 factors and 6.1 assists in 2021, and he or she was an All-Star and second-team All-WNBA choice this previous season, averaging 17.4 factors, 7.1 rebounds and 6.3 assists.

“As a child rising up within the sport, my household helped me develop my ardour for basketball and all of the values it rewards,” Ionescu stated. “Once I arrived at Oregon, I joined a brand new household that embraced those self same values and helped me develop much more as a participant and as an individual. A part of my coronary heart stays in Eugene, and I sit up for cultivating the identical household ambiance for future Geese within the Oregon girls’s basketball program.”