It is hard for Wright State women’s basketball center Richelle van der Keijl to blend in. Standing 6-foot-5, she is the tallest player in the Horizon League and one of the tallest in all of college basketball.
After struggling to take advantage of her height early in the season, van der Keijl, a native of Delft, The Netherlands, had a breakout performance Saturday versus Cleveland State scoring 19 points and grabbing eight rebounds. It was van der Keijl’s first double-digit performance against a Division I opponent.
Coming into Saturday’s game versus Cleveland State, she had only played seven minutes in Horizon League action, scoring two points.
Last year, van der Keijl missed the entire season due to an Achilles injury she suffered on the first day of practice. Since then, her recovery has been slow. Saturday was the first time van der Keijl played at least 20 minutes at WSU.
Even after 18 months of healing, she still feels the pain from the injury.
“It was hard at the beginning of the season, I couldn’t practice a lot in the preseason,” van der Keijl said. “With hard work and practicing against good players, it helps a lot.”
The year off gave van der Keijl, an opportunity to adjust to living in a new nation and in a city she had never heard of.
Van der Keijl was an impressive contributor to The Netherlands’ U-20 squad in the summer of 2013. In nine contests, she averaged over 30 minutes a game and 12.7 points a contest.
While van der Keijl is listed as a sophomore because of her experience overseas, this is her first season of playing college basketball.
Despite offers from Syracuse and Gonzaga, she opted to commit to Mike Bradbury and the Raiders. While she had the opportunity to play professional basketball in The Netherlands, the opportunity to get an education was enough for her to make the move.
“I want to learn and I when I came here, I saw they play physical and fast,” van der Keijl said. “Playing fast is not my thing, but playing physical, I can work on that with Tayler (Stanton) and our other centers in practice.”
Part of the reason van der Keijl came to Wright State specifically was because of guards Kim Demmings and Tay’ler Mingo. Demmings was named the league’s Preseason Player of the Year before getting a season-ending injury the first game of the season. Mingo has stepped up during Demmings’ absence and been one of the nation’s leading scorers this year.
Mingo assisted van der Keijl five times in Saturday’s contest.
“Richelle is great. I wish she could play more but with all the matchups, it is hard, especially with us being in the Horizon League with everyone being small,” Mingo said. “She has improved a lot.”
Enough though van der Keijl is studying mass communications, it was tough last year for her to communicate with her teammates. Though van der Keijl learned English in school, she said she had a difficult time with the language. In the last 18 months, her English has improved.
“It is a lot better than it was last year,” van der Keijl said. “I was very bad at it.”
“It was difficult at times (to understand her),” Mingo said.
Bradbury has seen her progress since joining WSU.
“She has a really good attitude,” Bradbury said. “She is continuing to work and get better even though she hasn’t gotten a lot of minutes. Good kid and she continues to improve.”
