Ambrosia Anderson: Hitting her stride

PROVO — To realize where Ambrosia Anderson is now, you've got to understand where the BYU women's basketball standout has been.

She was a highly touted Colorado prep recruit who brought herself to Provo to sign with a coach who'd never seen her play.

As an underclassman she exuded talent and superior athletic ability but could easily look lost on the court.

Now she's a high-scoring senior forward who currently is flirting with Mountain West Conference player-of-the-year honors despite not even being mentioned on the preseason all-league lists.

Anderson and her Cougars have enjoyed quite a season to date. Through the end of January, BYU ran its record to 17-1 overall 7-0 Mountain West, making a rare run with the nation's top 20 ranked teams. Meanwhile, Anderson was holding her season averages at 19.4 points and 7.9 rebounds — the latter is No. 2 in the conference and the former tops in the league and 20th in the country.

Last month alone, she posted three of her 11 20-point games this season: 21 against Air Force; 24 against UNLV; and another 24 at TCU. In that game, she hit 6 of 10 from behind the arc and added two pair of blocks and steals as well as 10 rebounds for her fifth double-double of the year.

In a mid-month game at Wyoming, Anderson surpassed the 1,000-point career scoring plateau, only the 18th Cougar ever to reach the four-digit benchmark.

With those numbers and the Cougars' success, Anderson was an easy choice as the Deseret Morning News' Athlete of the Month for January 2006.

She's in a neck-and-neck race with three-time MWC player-of-the-year — Utah's Kim Smith — for conference scoring honors as evidenced by Wednesday's head-to-head meeting. In the BYU loss (only the Cougars' second this year), Anderson finished with 24 points and seven boards, while Smith tallied 21 and 11. The latter holds .3 advantage in scoring average, 19.0 to 18.7, going into Saturday's games.

Rand McNally played as much of a role as BYU head coach Jeff Judkins in landing Anderson in Provo. A two-time Colorado all-stater and a Street and Smith's Top 25 selection, Anderson was en route from Colorado Springs to a Southern California wedding when her mother suggested an impromptu stop at BYU for an unofficial campus visit.

With the perennial powerhouses among the 200-plus colleges hot on her tail, Anderson had whittled her prospects to single digits, including BYU somewhat by default because her membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Judkins, the recently named coach, remembers the phone call from Anderson, saying she had reached a decision. As a new coach, he never saw here play in person, so he was expecting the worse, but was ecstatic when Anderson announced BYU as the best fit.