When comparing the Big East Conference to the Ohio Valley Conference, sure the Big East has better talent, crowds and national exposure, but there is one positive for the OVC: a minute recruiting pool.

This is a good thing, because it can establish camaraderie between teams and players on those teams. With women’s basketball teams from the Big East, such as Connecticut and Notre Dame, coaches recruit players from all over the nation, like a bunch of different colored bugs asked to come to a school and turn into one united color – like blue.

When you put Connecticut and Notre Dame together in one arena, you have a bunch of players who only know each other based on their impressive statistics. Thursday, when Eastern and Southern Illinois-Edwardsville competed in Lantz Arena, there was much more on the line than improving stats and records.

Like all teams in the OVC, the Panthers and Cougars recruit from the same kiddy pool. When you are only recruiting against conference teams in a select few states, you run into situations like the one Jordyne Crunk and Jazmin Hill were in Thursday as high school teammates on different college teams.

It is easy not to realize this sort of thing is happening in the OVC, but it really is, and it is good for the conference to have player-to-player rivalries rooted from being on the same high school team.

Not only is it good for the conference, but it is interesting to write about, fun to talk about and exciting to experience, especially for the players involved.

“It was really funny, we talked trash during the week,” Crunk said.

Crunk and Hill went to Althoff Catholic High School in Belleville, which is only about a 30-minute drive away from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where Hill ended up out of high school. With Belleville and Edwardsville being near-neighboring towns, Crunk did not only know Hill personally, she knew most of the team.

“SIU-E is really close to my home and I played a lot with those girls in the summer, so I knew how they played,” Crunk said.

Unlike Big East players, the OVC has Crunk and Hill, along with other situations like this one, who are already close friends coming into the game, having played on the same team in high school.

It is that kind of camaraderie that makes the OVC what it is. When you have players who know each other as well as Crunk and Hill do, it makes for better games, because those players will be even more excited to play than they would be just playing a regular conference game.

Having played on the same high school team, the same person who coached them is what makes the Crunk-Hill rivalry truly unique. Crunk’s mom, Lori, was their coach for all four years of high school. Both Lori and Jordyne’s dad, RJ, were at the game Thursday to root on their freshman daughter, as she outplayed one of Althoff Catholic’s other former star pupils.

Crunk and Hill are both freshman and budding stars. The good news for the OVC is this personal rivalry can only get more intense with time.

Alex McNamee can be reached at 581-7944 or [email protected].