The University of British Columbia Athletics

VANCOUVER - The Thunderbirds embark to Calgary this weekend to take on the Mount Royal Cougars in a back-to-back affair. Mount Royal are the only team in the Pacific Division outside of British Columbia and while it's a long way to travel for the weekend, it does offer the Thunderbirds the chance to pick up a couple of wins against division rivals and position themselves closer to a playoff berth.

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UBC find themselves tied for second in the Pacific, right amongst it with the same 7-5 record as Thompson Rivers and Victoria and just one game back of the University of the Fraser Valley. Despite two tight losses to the two top-ranked teams in the conference, the Thunderbirds have plenty to look forward to. Ten games remain in the regular season and seven of those games come against sub .500 teams. They play Calgary (10-2) in Calgary and have a home-and-away against Victoria (7-5) on the final weekend of the season. The Thunderbirds can feel relieved to have the harder half of their season behind them and must look to cash in on the favourable schedule ahead.
 
Senior Kris Young continues to lead this team in terms of scoring (16.5), blocks (0.8), steals (3.2) and three-pointers made (1.6) but has a strong supporting cast around her that take it in turns to facilitate her scoring. Harleen Sidhu has had a relatively quiet last few games but is more than capable of returning to the sort of form that gave us 31 points and 15 rebounds in just her third game for UBC. With this weekend's opponents holding the worst record in Canada West, it would be a perfect opportunity to reignite her already impressive first season wearing blue and gold.
 
Mount Royal appear very unlikely to make the playoffs this season with a record of 1-11 through 12 games. However, they do possess two talented young players in Jordan McLean and Alicia Tan that the 'Birds will have to be wary of this year and a few more to come. McLean is a second-year forward who already leads the Canada West in rebounding with 11.6 boards per game and sits 13th in scoring with 13.6 points per game. Five-foot guard Tan is in her first year out of high school and sits second in the conference in steals with 3.9 per game and eighth in assists with 3.6 per game as well as contributing an average of 10.9 points to her team's total.

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