Marino Spikes Website
Tagged in: BBNZ News, Tall Ferns
The exploits of Mini-Me point guard Angela Marino and her New Zealand Tall Ferns team-mates helped Basketball New Zealand’s website, www.basketball.org.nz, set a new single-day visits record earlier this month.
Following the Tall Ferns final group game against the eventual gold medalists USA at the Beijing Olympics, played at 2am (NZ time), the website had 3544 visits on August 18, the majority coming from Stateside and viewing Marino’s profile.
The new number easily eclipsed the previous record of 2335 visits on June 10, the first day of the much-anticipated 2008 National Basketball League playoffs.
More than 53 percent of the total traffic came from the USA, with 92 percent of those new visitors to the site, a large number likely to be college coaches and administrators researching players they could sign for the upcoming season.
Marino’s profile page was viewed 1292 times, while the profiles of team-mates Charmian Purcell, Natalie Purcell and Noni Wharemate also had more than 500 views.
After the Olympics, Marino returns to Adelaide where she will prepare for the Australia Women’s National Basketball League season with the defending champion Adelaide Lightning, owned by her father.
The 1.65m guard averaged 15.8 points and 2.4 assists per game in Beijing, shooting 35.6 percent from the field, 40.7 percent on three-point attempts and 83.9 percent from the free-throw stripe. Marino scored in double figures in four games, scoring a tournament-high 22 points against the Czech Republic, and averaged 33 minutes per game.
The Tall Ferns finished 10th ahead of Brazil and Mali, with one win from five group games.
