Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/651663
enn State had just 0nished o1 Illi- nois, 75-66, in the 0rst round of the Big Ten tournament March 2 at Indianapolis, and a reporter in the postgame news conference wanted to know how Teniya Page felt about her per- formance. She had scored 18 points and added a career-best nine assists, and given that it was her 0rst postseason game as a collegiate player, it might have seemed as though she would be on cloud nine. She was not. Nor was she on clouds one through eight. "Honestly, to me, it's not a big deal," Page said. "I'm just happy we won. To be a freshman and the leading scorer of my team… I don't know, I guess it would be a big deal. But to me, it's not." That may be because Page was, by that point in her debut season, quite accus- tomed to the spotlight. A 5-foot-7 guard from Chicago, she led Penn State in scoring in 11 of its 31 games this season. Page av- eraged a team-best 15.3 points per game, ranking 18th in the Big Ten. So her scoring binge against the Illini was by no means unexpected, nor was the comparable e1ort she turned in the following night when she 0nished with a team-best 18 points and four assists in a season-ending 70- 59 loss to Purdue in the Big Ten quarter- 0nals. Page's emergence was perhaps the most exciting storyline of the year for Penn State. She had come to University Park with high expectations a2er ranking among the top 30 recruits in the nation following a brilliant career at Marian Catholic High, and she delivered on all of them, quickly establishing herself as the team's most indispensible player. Page was the only Lady Lion to start all 31 games, and she averaged more than 37 minutes per game to lead the team. With the loss to the Boilermakers on WOMEN'S BASKETBALL PAGE TO THE STAGE P Season ends at Big Ten tourney, but freshman Teniya Page shines for PSU ELEVENTH HOUR Page drives past Michigan's Madison Ristovski during a game at the BJC in January. Photo by Patrick Mansell |