A Pleasant Surprise

USF women’s basketball coach Molly Goodenbour never actually had seen Debora dos Santos play in person when she offered her a scholarship. A 6-foot forward from Brazil, dos Santos spent the 2020-21 season at a Texas junior college, but the pandemic prevented her from taking campus recruiting visits and limited Goodenbour’s ability to make scouting trips.

Brazilian-born Arthur Moreira, a USF assistant coach and the program’s international recruiting coordinator, convinced Goodenbour dos Santos was a player the Dons needed. “I was relying on what Arthur said,” she explained.

So dos Santos arrived on campus before last season and promptly tore the ACL in her right knee during the Dons’ first practice of the year. She missed all of the 2021-22 campaign, so Goodenbour still hadn’t seen her play.

Last summer, at last, she was back on the court. “We saw glimpses,” Goodenbour said. Then in September, while watching dos Santos go 3-on-3 on a short full court, the Dons’ coach finally got a good look.

“She scored like 15 points in a row. Nobody could stop her,” Goodenbour said. “We’d never seen that. We were thinking if she can be this player, she could be pretty good.”

Dos Santos remembers the moment. “I was excited. I was jumping around the whole time. I felt really happy,” said dos Santos, whose reaction to the injury a year earlier was much different. “Of course, I started crying,” she said. “I was so sad.”

Things are better now for dos Santos and the Dons, who are 12-3 overall and 2-1 in the West Coast Conference after an 80-79 overtime victory at Santa Clara on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. Making just her second start of the season, dos Santos scored 24 points on 10-for-14 shooting and had eight rebounds and four steals.

“She has been playing so well,” Goodenbour said. “She’s really only kind of scratching the surface of what she’s going to be capable of doing. But she has great character and her teammates love playing with her. She is effective and efficient.

“She’s got a long way to go but she has tremendous potential. She’s very humble and I think she’s got all the things internally you need to become a really, really good player.”

Already the redshirt sophomore is providing just what the Dons hoped she would. She is second on the team in scoring (12.7 points) and rebounding (7.2) and leads USF in field-goal accuracy (57 percent), steals (19) and blocked shots (15).

Because dos Santos was recovering from a serious injury and had never played on the Division I level, Goodenbour didn’t want to give her too much too soon. So after starting the season opener, dos Santos began coming off the bench as part of a reserve squad that has given USF a huge lift.

Dos Santos has posted eight games of at least 15 points — seven of them coming off the bench — and all four of her double-digit rebounding games were as a reserve. Guard Jasmine Gayles has yet to start a game, but she is third on the team, averaging 11.6 points. Reserves Loren Christie and Kia Vaalavirta combined for 24 points in the Santa Clara win.

Goodenbour wanted more depth and more help for two-time All-WCC guard Ioanna Krimili, whose 17.7 average puts her on pace to lead the conference in scoring for a third consecutive season.

“(Krimili) can make an unbelievable quantity of shots, but we’re trying to find a happy medium where she doesn’t have to take 25 shots a game,” Goodenbour said. “She still needs to take 15 shots.”

The Dons’ bench has delivered that remedy. USF’s non-starters have contributed a robust average of 34.3 points per game — 46 percent of the team’s scoring. Reserves have totaled at least 40 points in six different games.

That production from so many players makes Goodenbour feel like she has as many as nine potential starters. Those coming off the bench have accepted their roles. “They’re awesome — really, really unselfish,” she said. “They put their egos to the side and have been willing to do whatever the team needs.”

Dos Santos is just happy to be playing and contributing. “It was actually good. I didn’t see anything bad about it,” she said of her 13 games as a reserve. “I’m just here to help my team.”

She embraces living in San Francisco, where recently she and her mother, Flavia, visiting from home, found a shop that sells chocolate panettone cake, a Brazilian favorite, to help celebrate Christmas.

Her first stop in the U.S., as a high school senior, was at the Wasatch Academy, a well-respected private school founded in 1875 and located about 100 miles south of Salt Lake City. “I went from the big city to kind of the middle of nowhere,” dos Santos said of her transition from Rio de Janeiro and its population of 6.7 million to Mt. Pleasant, Utah, with barely 3,700 residents.

“At the same time, it was really comfortable because you pretty much know everyone,” said dos Santos, who averaged 16 points and broke the school’s rebounding record in her one season. 

From there she moved on to South Plains College in Levelland, Texas, where she earned third-team All-America junior college honors.

Now, after sitting out last season to let her knee mend, dos Santos will get her first chance to play WCC powerhouse and 20th-ranked Gonzaga (14-2, 4-0). The Dons visit Spokane on Thursday before playing at conference co-leader Portland (10-5, 4-0) two days later. 

“They are the benchmark for our league, not just on one night but pretty much every night and then backing it up at the (NCAA) Tournament,”  Goodenbour said of the Zags, acknowledging the Dons’ 14-game losing streak in the series. “We look forward to this game. You know they’re going to be a really good team.”

Dos Santos didn’t travel with the team to Gonzaga last season but she was on the bench at home when the Dons threw a scare into the Zags before losing 83-82 on a basket at the buzzer. “I can’t get that game out of my mind,” she said. “I’m excited.”

THE LATEST FROM DOWN UNDER: Saint Mary’s coach Randy Bennett has fortified his roster with the mid-season arrival of 6-foot-5 freshman Rory Hawke, the Gaels’ 23rd player hailing from Australia. 

Hawke graduated last month from the Centre of Excellence — the alma mater of the Gaels’ other three current Aussies — where he averaged 16.1 points, 5.6 rebounds and 2.8 assists and shot 54 percent from the field this past season. He made his national team debut with Australia’s U20 team, averaging 15.5 points and 7.9 rebounds over eight games at the FIBA World Cup qualifying.

Plans are for Hawke to red-shirt this season but he was on hand Tuesday night when the Gaels (13-4) posted an 84-64 win over Academy of Art as freshman Aidan Mahaney scored 19 points, walk-on Luke Barrett had a career-high 15 points, and senior Kyle Bowen grabbed 15 rebounds, giving him 43 in the past three games.