Buffs Victorious in Spain Opener

MADRID, Spain—The Colorado Buffaloes women's basketball team had a busy second day of its foreign tour of Spain. The team spent the greater part of the day touring the old town of Toledo and then spent the evening competing against a team of Madrid All-Stars.

The Buffs scored a 77-63 victory in the first to three games to be played in Spain.

"I'm really proud of how we played tonight," head coach JR Payne noted. "We knew coming in that it wouldn't be beautiful, being that it's our first game, new players and all the travel. I thought we did a great job of making some adjustments and our veterans did a great job of helping manage the game."

Colorado got key contributions from Frida Formann and Aaronette Vonleh early in the first quarter. Formann drilled a pair of 3's and Vonleh worked hard on the offensive glass to help CU to a 22-10 lead.

Vonleh, Brianna McLeod and Tayanna Jones all got in on the offensive action in the second quarter. The Buffs maintained the lead, 36-28, at halftime and used multiple 3's from Formann in the third to extend the lead to 59-47.

The Buffs posted 14 more points in the final quarter to close out the win.  

All five of the new Buffs were able to get into the mix and both Charlotte Whittaker and Tameiya Sadler returned to game-action from their respective injuries.

"Practice is always different from a game," Payne added. "It was great to have Charlotte back. It was nice to see people adjusting to different roles. Netty [Vonleh] is someone that can be absolutely dominant inside, she just needs to know it. To see our freshmen out there hitting shots, Frida knocked down a bunch of 3's, Jaylyn [Sherrod] and Kindyll [Wetta] back on the floor and Tam [Sadler] back after missing the last part of last season – it's wonderful."

The games played on these foreign tours are often a blind ordeal. Unlike normal games, there's very little preparation or scout that can be done ahead of time.

"We were saying before the game that it's such a scary thing for a coach to go into a game with no scouting report," Payne joked. "We scout things so extensively. We tried to watch warmups a bit and see who could shoot and they were all pretty good shooters. It's a fun experience and it's a neat thing for our players to be here and do all these different tours and to be able to add basketball to the mix is great."

CU's next game will be in Valencia on Aug. 11.