BATON ROUGE — LSU’s Collis Temple and Centenary’s Ronnie McCollum shared men’s honors and Louisiana Tech’s Ayana Walker captured women’s honors in this week’s Louisiana Sports Writers Association College Basketball Player of the Week voting.
The nominations are made by basketball SIDs at the state universities and then voted on by a panel of LSWA members.
McCollum, the senior guard for the Gents from Fayette, Ala., did nothing to harm his nation’s leading scorer average of 28.4 points per game, getting 36 in a win against Belmont and a career-high tying 40 against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi. For the week, McCollum shot a sizzling 50 percent (23-of-46) from the field, 33 percent (5-of-15) from three-point range and 93 percent (25-of-27) from the free throw line, including 17-of-19 in the Belmont win. He also had nine rebounds and three assists, while playing 79 of a possible 80 minutes.
Temple, LSU’s starting sophomore third guard from Baton Rouge, shot 51.7 percent from the floor (15-of-29), including 7-of-12 (58.3 percent) from three-point range on 3-pointers in a 1-1 week for the Tigers. Temple posted a career best 27 points, 16 in the second half, in the win at Mississippi State with six rebounds, two assists and two steals. Saturday, in a narrow loss to Arkansas, Temple had 16 points, five rebounds and three steals.
On the women’s side, Walker, the 6-2, junior from Houston, averaged 17.0 points, 13.0 rebounds 3.0 assists and 2.5 blocked shots in Tech’s two road wins over Middle Tennessee and Arkansas-Little Rock, hitting 13-of-26 FGs and 8-11 FTs. Recorded her sixth and seventh double-doubles of the season against Middle Tennessee (22 points, 13 rebounds) and UALR (12 points, 13 rebounds).