During the WNBA season, I cornered Renee Montgomery before the start of a Connecticut Sun game to talk about her plans for playing overseas. At the time she said she was headed to Israel but wasn't planning to be there for the entire season since she was going to further her broadcasting career.

However, for her exuberant, bubbly persona, Montgomery is first and foremost a competitor. Getting cut from the U.S. Senior National team seemed to light a fire under the former UConn All-American. Now she is planning to play for the entire season with Maccabi Ashdod. I am sure the people who run the team are delighting considering that Montgomery has scored at least 20 points in three of her last four games and in six games this season she is averaging 21 points, 3.3 rebounds and 3.7 assists per game. She is also shooting 51.7 percent from the field including 50 percent from 3-point range. The latter number ought to make Sun fans giddy since Montgomery shot just 34.9 percent from 3-point range during the most recent WNBA season.

A special thanks to Connecticut Sun media relations director Bill Tavares for not only setting up a call with Renee but since it conflicted with an open practice up at UConn, making sure that three questions I would have asked had I been on there (how's the season in Israel progessing, is she planning to cut her time in Israel short so she can take some broadcasting assignments after the first of the year and what was her reaction to Maya Moore closing in on Tina Charles' UConn scoring record) were asked of Renee.

Here are her thoughts on the first two questions. I will save the answer to the third question to run with my advance to Sunday's UConn game against Sacred Heart since Moore needs only nine points to become the Huskies all-time leading scorer.

"I thought it would be good just from this past year’s USA Basketball experience," Montgomery said. "I didn’t make the World Championship team. After that experience, I realized I didn’t have much time overseas playing against foreign players, and just that whole aspect of it that the USA would be playing people from another country. I just thought it would be good to get some experience playing overseas. Also, with Israel, we play one game a week, maybe two. That gives me five days just to work on things at practice that I want to work on.

"It’s kind of hard to, not change your game, but work on your game, while you’re playing games. It’s like trying to change things or fix things while you’re in season. You usually just revert back to what you know. So I thought being here in Israel was a great off-season because I’m not going to be pounding my body too bad, with one game a week, but also I’d be able to work on things. It’s kind of the
perfect scenario where I can work on things for five days and have a game
to try it out, then do the same thing, and repeat it.”

Montgomery said she plans on playing full seasons overseas both this year and next to fine tune her game.

"I’m pretty much planning on playing overseas the next two years, obviously
through 2012. Just trying to make sure I put myself in the best position to
be successful right now as a basketball player. Certain things like TV, I’m
not saying it will always be there, but hopefully I’ll be able to pursue it
later.

"Once I got cut (from the U.S. squad), I figured it was the best thing for me. I figured if you’re doing something one way, and it’s not working, then I figured I’d
try to change it. I can see improvements already in my game from the two or
three months I’ve been here in Israel. It keeps you sharp playing year
round. I’m not saying I want to play year round all the time, but I want to
be as sharp as possible.”


The purpose of the call was the promote Montgomery's website www.r21m.com which will be a site where she can interact with fans and take full advantage of the social networking world she is so immersed in.

"I think with the emergence of Twitter, it just became this whole new platform where athletes can have one-on-one contact if they want with fans, and it’s a way that you can give news, anything that’s going on," Montgomery said. "You can reach a lot of people with one message. For instance, some athletes have 100,000 followers. I’m speaking about NBA, NFL (athletes) so if you can type one message about, 'I’m doing a turkey drive and I want you to bring any canned goods you can,' you can send one message and maybe reach 100,000 people. Yes it’s our age, but it’s also one of the best ways that there’s been available to get news out to your fans. On last minute things too. Before, you might have had to do press releases. It was harder to get
in contact with a lot of people. Now, if there is a last minute thing like
‘Oh, the (turkey) drive is going to be an hour later,’ you can still reach
the same people with a quick message.”

Here's what she had to say about her new website

"The website re-lauching was more of my web designer's idea. She said there
was a lot of new technology out there where I could do polls, triva games,
etc. So to be able to do all those things, there were a lot of technological things that I needed to change over. So since we had to do that anyway, we thought, why not just have a re-launching and just let everybody know that the site is changing instead of people coming to it and saying, 'Oh, this looks a little different.' So we just wanted to change it up. It's going to have more photos and different contests to win tickets to Connecticut Sun games. The first contest we're doing is the Ugly Sweater Contest. I'm sure everybody knows what an ugly Christmas sweater is, so you have to take a picture...basically the re-launching is just so that
everyone can be more interactive."