Basketball On The Internet.

From BOB CRAVEN in Seattle

GEORGIA Amoore is an Aussie from Ballarat and the PG for the Virginia Tech Hokies, a No.1 seed in this year's women's NCAA tournament, playing tonight against Ohio State U. in the Elite Eight for the right to go on to the Final Four this weekend.

Her family moved to a horse farm when she was a teenager because her mother is a horse trainer.  The farm had a sand track, so after the horses galloped on it, Amoore would run on it.

Georgia was very active as a youth and into playing all kinds of sport, including against the boys. 

Her mother tried to steer her away from basketball because she was so short (168cm) and mum didn't think she'd have a future in basketball because of her size. 

Her dad had played Aussie Rules, so she did too, and was pretty good at it.  She was on a girls' team and a boys' team simultaneously. 

"I played with aggression", she once told a reporter.

That caused problems one year as she suffered a concussion and missed out on basketball for a week.  Her mother told her that if she was going to be dead serious about basketball, she'd need to give up footy. 

As basketball was her favourite sport, she decided to concentrate on that at age 17.  Up to that point, she was doing basketball, footy, taekwondo, cricket, netball, track and field, and swimming ("I hated swimming because it got my hair wet.")

Amoore has a cousin, who currently plays basketball for the University of Portland in Oregon, so she decided to come to the US to play the game.  She has another cousin who is a rower for Syracuse U. in New York. 

She is such a good passer that she was on the Australia team in the U-17 World Cup in Belarus.  She was only the third-string point guard, but the Virginia Tech coach saw her at that tournament and liked her, deciding that she was the point guard he was looking for. 

Tech and her cousin's team in Portland offered her scholarships, but she decided on Tech because it was a bigger and would be a bigger challenge for her.

She enrolled in January of 2020 and got to practice with the team, but hated the cold winter weather.  Then came the coronavirus pandemic and everything shut down. 

The family wanted her to come back to Oz, but she decided to go home with one of her teammates there in Virginia, 198cm post player, Elizabeth Kitley. 

They are now roommates at the school and best friends.  Kitley says that has helped on the court, too, as their chemistry is excellent.

Amoore became the starting PG her first year at Virginia Tech and made the league's all-freshman team (a first-year player). 

The following season she was selected as honourable mention all-conference.  This year, she's averaging 15.3 points and 5.3 assists per game, and recently was named to the all-conference
first team. 

Three months ago, she logged the first triple-double in the history of the program (24-10-11).  In the recent conference tournament, she earned MVP honours as Tech won the tournament for the first time.

Her coach, a point guard himself in his playing days, said of her that: "She provides the leadership ... she's the engine.  She starts everything."  And this evening she will try to lead the Hokies (a local nickname for wild turkeys) over Ohio State and into the Final Four.