BATON ROUGE — Forward Ledaryl Billingsley and guard Marie Ferdinand, hot-shooting players from Tulane and LSU won the Louisiana Sports Writers Association college basketball player of the week awards Monday.
Billingsley sank 18-of-32 shots from the field while averaging 21.5 points in two games last week to win the men’s award. Ferdinand made 15-of-24 shots while scoring 20.5 in a pair of wins by the LSU women’s team.
Voting was done by a panel of sports media throughout the state.
Billingsley led Tulane in scoring against Mississippi State and Alabama-Birmingham this week and has now scored 20 or more in four straight games. Against Mississippi State the senior captain scored 21 points, including the 1,000th point of his Tulane career. He followed that with 22 against UAB and now has 1,026 points, which ranks 22nd all-time at Tulane.
In addition, he cracked the 600-rebound milestone in the Mississippi State game. He now has 614 career boards. Billingsley, who has struggled from the line for much of the year, has also improved to 67.5 percent in the last five games from
the charity stripe. His 22 points and 10 rebounds against UAB were his eighth double-double of the season.
Ferdinand, a 5-9 product of Miami, Fla., led LSU to wins over Kentucky and Ole Miss on the week as she scored 22 points and 19 points, respectively. She was 8-for-10 shooting against the Lady Wildcats and followed that up with a 7-for-14 performance at Ole Miss.
Against Kentucky, she scored 15 first-half points to erase an 18-point first-half deficit by the break. With the first of her three steals against Kentucky, she reached 200 for her career. She played all 40 minutes against Ole Miss and dished out a season-high seven assists.
For the week, she averaged 20.5 points, 3.5 rebounds, 4.5 assists and 1.5 steals. Billingsley edged Centenary’s Ronnie McCollum, Ben Perkins of McNeese, Paul Haynes of Grambling, Zach Johnson from Louisiana Tech and Louisiana-Lafayette’s Darryl Robins in the men’s division.
Ferdinand topped Shrieka Evans of Grambling, Cheryl Ford from Louisiana Tech and Stacey Turner of Southeastern Louisiana for the women’s award.