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Matt Sepic
St. Paul, Minn.

Stollings wants Gopher women hoopsters to 'accomplish great things'

Marlene Stollings
Marlene Stollings directing VCU during a game earlier this year against the University of Richmond.
AP

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The University of Minnesota introduced its new women's head basketball coach Tuesday. Marlene Stollings comes to the university from Virginia Commonwealth University where she was head coach for two seasons and led what had been a losing team to a spot in the women's National Invitation Tournament.

Stollings says she'll recruit top talent aggressively, but the current roster has a lot of potential.

She will have a pair of stars in senior-to-be guard Rachel Banham and center Amanda Zahui B, who was voted the Big Ten Freshman of the Year. Banham led the conference in scoring, and Zahui B was the top rebounder. Also, guard Carlie Wagner is the highlight of the incoming recruiting class. Wagner was the state's all-time leading scorer at New Richland-Hartland-Ellendale-Geneva High School.

"The cupboard is not bare, and that's exciting for me to come into a program with the amount of talent that exists here," she said. "I think that we can move up the ladder and accomplish great things in a short amount of time. It's not something that we have to wait a number of years for."

"We want to be playing into the second weekend of the NCAA tournament. We want to give our young ladies an opportunity to play in a Final Four again," she added.

The 1998 graduate of Ohio University, who started her college playing career at Ohio State, Stollings also been an assistant at Mississippi, Saint Louis, Wright State, New Mexico State and Jacksonville.

Stollings had a record-setting career at Eastern High School in Beaver, Ohio, and still holds the state's all-time scoring record for either gender with 3,514 points -- ahead of LeBron James, who had 2,646 points.

She takes over for Pam Borton, who was fired last month. The Gophers finished the season 22 and 13, but missed the NCAA tournament for the fifth straight year. Borton has the most wins in program history, with a 236-152 record over 12 seasons, but since taking the Gophers to the Final Four 10 years ago the success was not sustained. This season, they went 0-8 against the top five teams in the Big Ten.

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The Associated Press contributed to this story.