Texas Tech women's basketball adds to their backcourt with three year starter and rising senior guard out of UTSA, Sidney Love. The Cibolo, Texas native averaged 10.3 points, 3.6 rebounds, 3.6 assists and 1.3 steals helping the Road Runners to the best season in school history this past season. She reportedly also received interest from Cal, Baylor and Mississippi State amongst others.
Love was a star at Steele HS earning a McDonald's All-American Game nomination as well as All-State honors her senior season before deciding to play for the newly hired Karen Aston and help build up her hometown University. Mission accomplished, the Road Runners won a program record 26 games this past season including a 17-1 American Athletic Conference record to win the regular season championship.
"Our staff has known Sidney Love for a long time! We are incredibly proud of her accomplishments during her time at UTSA," Gerlich said. "As a three-year starter, she concluded her last season with an AAC Regular-Season Championship. In our search for an impact player at the guard position, Sidney is the perfect fit. She will provide an immediate boost of athleticism to our backcourt and provides us with an additional ball-handler. We are excited to welcome Sidney to our Lady Raider family!"
One of the things that sticks out most about Love is she has played up to her competition throughout her three years in college, compiling a number of solid games against power conference opponents. She even dropped 18 points on Texas Tech in Lubbock back during the '23-'24 season.
Notable Power Conference Performances:
Texas A&M: 10 points, 5 rebounds, 1 assist, 2 steals
Stanford - 14 points, 4 rebounds, 1 steal
Arizona State - 7 points, 2 rebounds, 1 assist, 1 steal
Texas Tech - 18 points, 3 rebounds, 1 assits, 2 steals
Houston - 13 points, 3 rebounds, 2 assists, 2 steals
Oregon - 9 points, 6 rebounds, 2 assists, 3 steals
She also handled business against mid-major foes with her best career game coming this past season when she put together a 21 point, 11 assist, 5 rebound and 5 steal game in the team's win over UTRGV.
A trend of this team's transfer adds has been high level finishers at the rim and this is something Love continues as she finished at a 62% rate there, good for five percent above the D1 average. Tech as a team last year shot only 57 percent from this area.
She also joins a backcourt that all the sudden has a pretty good ability to block shots as a group (especially for guards) which is something that, outside of Denae Fritz, was not an area of strength for Tech this past season. Of the four main 1-2 guards last season only Fritz averaged more than 0.1 blocks per game as she was in the 96th percentile in the country at 0.6. Love and previous guard portal addition Gemma Nunez both came in at 0.4 blocks on the season which is 86th percentile in the country.
With the addition of Love Texas Tech now has eight seniors on the roster, something that should be welcomed since maturity is exactly what is needed when trying to prove people wrong and resurrect a program. Love has done that once with UTSA and will look to join a group hungry to do the same in Lubbock next season.
Welcome to the family Sidney!
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