With older sister Haylee having graduated, it looked as though there might be an opportunity for Lepaio to gain more court time as one of the side’s main talls, but the arrival of another Australian player curtailed that somewhat.

“I did get a little more game time this season with Haylee not in the squad, but a new tall [Meg Essex] came into the side and she was really dominant,” Lepaio explained.

“I got to spend a bit of time in a centre-forward sort of role occasionally and I thought I did okay.

“As a team we went reasonably well. We lost so many seniors from the previous season so there weren’t as many expectations on us, but we still managed to make our conference semi-finals.

“We played Wingate and came up against a girl who had a career-high scoring game kind of out of the blue and that was the end of it for us.”

Overall, Newberry finished the season with a 17-13 record and a 16-7 record in South Atlantic Conference matches.

Lepaio had a couple of memorable performances, including a match against Carson-Newman in which she posted 10 points and pulled down five rebounds.

Averaging around 10 minutes of court-time per match, she scored at 3.5 points per game, and grabbed 2.5 rebounds.

“From what the coach has said, I will hopefully have a bit more freedom to shoot from further out next season. It is kind of generally put on the talls to only shoot from close to the basket, but my shooting is something I’ve put a lot of work into,” she said.

“I am aiming to work pretty hard on my fitness, too, in order to try to create some more of those scoring opportunities and use that jump shot a bit more.

“I did notice about halfway through the season that things started to click a little bit better for me and there are a lot of things from the last 10 or 12 games that I can take into next season.”

While she is at home, the issue of fitness will have to be carefully managed given that she is carrying a troublesome foot injury that has already messed with her college career to some degree. 

The double-degree criminal justice and psychology student will be forced to adopt a low-impact training regime during her off-season.

“I only played half of my first season over there before getting injured with a broken bone in my foot,” she said.

“Towards the end of the season just gone, I had niggling pain in the same foot so the staff advised me to try to avoid running and higher impact exercise. Instead I’ll be doing work on the cross-trainer and exercise bike.”