GU soph Bowman is heart and soul of Zags

The focal point of the Bulldogs is truly the focal point of the Bulldogs. Heather Bowman may be the MVP and leading scorer in the West Coast Conference, but she is a target for more than passes from her Gonzaga teammates.

“She’s very easy to make fun of,” GU freshman guard Courtney Vandersloot said. “The whole team does.”

The unassuming sophomore star handles the grief as easily as she does a bad pass.

“She is,” GU coach Kelly Graves said, “the perfect teammate.”

It starts with Bowman’s ability to blend in off the court and take over on the court.

“On the court, she’s a very serious person. She knows when to get down to business,” Vandersloot said. “Off the court, she’s fun.”

“That girl is a maniac,” GU sophomore forward Vivian Frieson said. “She’s just intense. She doesn’t think anybody can beat her. That’s the confidence of a winner. She gets beat up more than anybody in practice and she always has a positive attitude. … We always give her a hard time. We call her ‘MVP,’ but she has the same humble attitude all the time.”

Bowman is averaging 20 points on 53 percent shooting and 8.5 rebounds heading into the Bulldogs’ WCC tournament opener against Pepperdine this afternoon in San Diego.

That comes on the heels of a freshman season in which she averaged 13 points and 6.1 rebounds to earn Newcomer of the Year. She bumped that to 15.7 on 67 percent shooting as the MVP when the Bulldogs won the WCC tournament to earn their first NCAA tournament berth.

“Before each season we set goals, team and individual, things you strive for which contribute to the team effort,” Bowman said. “We don’t look for awards, they happen. We just play our game. I didn’t think about it until it happened. It’s always nice to get rewarded for hard work.”

Graves expected big things from Bowman when he first saw her has a freshman at Lewis and Clark High.

“You could just see she had it,” he said. “I didn’t think she could come in this quickly and make such an impact, but we knew she was a special player.”

Bowman helped the Tigers make the State 4A tournament four times, capped by the first of three consecutive state titles as a senior, when she was the Greater Spokane League and state tournament MVP.

“Consistency,” was the way LC coach Jim Redmon described her. “I don’t know how many players have given that kind of consistency, game in and game out, especially for four years.”

That wasn’t the case in the first 16 games of her college career. She twice scored 23 points and once had 32, but she also had two games of two, two of four and once when she was held to a single free throw.

Once conference play started it was a different story. She only failed to score in double figures once, averaging 16.6 points in WCC games, highlighted by a weekend in the Bay Area when she had 53 points and 25 rebounds in two wins.

“She completely dominated,” Graves said. “From there, down the stretch, she took off. Not many people know she led the conference in scoring as a freshman. Before, she showed flashes. She started becoming consistent. That’s what set her apart.”

Though the Zags matched last season’s 13-1 romp through the WCC and are 22-7 compared to last year’s 21-9 record in the regular season, Bowman said there is a different feeling for her.

“Last year I had (league MVP) Stephanie Hawk – she was the leader,” she said. “This year I had to step up and improve my game. I have more versatility with my moves.”

Though she has expanded her offensive repertoire – “She’s a pretty good defender, that’s lost sometimes in all those numbers,” Graves said – what sets Bowman apart is the way she catches the ball before making a move.

“I think she doesn’t get enough credit for her hands,” Redmon said. “There are some basketballs she shouldn’t get her hands on and she does.”

“She can catch the ball in traffic, she can catch the ball off balance, she can improvise,” Graves said. “She just has a knack for scoring.”

Her teammates notice those hands as well.

“We tease her a lot,” Frieson said. “She’s 6-2, but she has these tiny, tiny hands, her feet are little and she has short legs. We tell her she’s supposed to be 5-8, 5-9.”

“We call her ‘Little Hands,’ but she’s always smiling,” Vandersloot said.

“I keep telling them they’re small and mighty,” Bowman said.

There seems to be one thing that hasn’t carried over from Bowman’s high school career, not that her teammates needed any more ammunition to bust her chops.

The Tigers were always saying, “Feed the Bird,” literally meaning the once gangly freshman needed to bulk up.

That became a mantra that the Bulldogs also follow to get her the ball, and now her teammates know they can double the fun with a little more needling of their perfect teammate.