Gonzaga’s Jill Barta on first team all-WCC

Gonzaga forward Jill Barta is one of 10 players named first-team All-West Coast Conference, the league announced Tuesday.

Barta, a 6-foot-3 redshirt freshman from Fairfield, Montana, averaged a team-high 16.3 points a game in conference play for the Bulldogs, who face Santa Clara in a WCC quarterfinal game on Thursday in Las Vegas.

Barta joins Courtney Vandersloot and Heather Bowman as the only GU freshman to be selected to the first team.

Barta ranks third in scoring in the WCC. Her 294 points in league play are the most points scored by a Zag in a single conference season.

She became only the fourth Gonzaga player to score 400 points in a single season in her freshman season. The Fairfield, Mont. native ranks eighth in the WCC averaging 13.9 points per game.

Barta ranks eighth on the program’s all-time rebounds list by a freshman with 162. She is third in the conference shooting 84 percent from the free-throw line. In WCC play, Barta has made 82 of her 90 free-throws, and leads the league at 91.1 percent in conference action. She’s ninth in the WCC making 44 percent of her shots from the field in league play.

Senior post Shelby Cheslek was tabbed honorable mention All-WCC. She was selected to the conference’s All-Academic team this season after being named honorable mention All-Academic the previous two years. The senior was selected to the conference’s all-tournament team as a freshman in 2013.

Lexi Rydalch of BYU was named the West Coast Conference Player of the Year. Her 24.1 points per game tops the league and is fourth in the country. She is now the conference’s all-time leading scorer with 2,437 points.

Coach of the Year Jeff Judkins put together a 16-2 season to lead BYU to its first WCC regular season title. The Cougars reeled off 16 consecutive wins in conference play, setting a new program mark for longest winning streak in BYU history. The 24-5 regular season record marked Judkins’s 10th season of 20 or more wins at BYU.