Kristen and EuroBasket Women tournament

Kristen Newlin is in Latvia with the Turkish National team, competing in the EuroBasket Women tournament for the European championship.

EuroBasket Women is held every other year. It alternates between serving as a qualifying tournament for the FIBA World Championship and the Olympics.

Competition begins today with the preliminary round and continues until the finals on June 20. 

This is a summary of the competition:

Preliminary Rounds: June 7-9. Round-robin competition within each of four groups of four teams. The Turkish team is in Group C with Lithuania, Russia and Serbia. The top 12 teams (three per group) advance to the:

Qualifying Rounds: June 11-16. Round-robin competition within each of two groups of six teams.  The top eight teams (four from each group) advance to the:

Quarterfinals: June 17-18. Four games with teams seeded according to the qualifying rounds (A1 vs B4, A2 vs B3, etc.). All eight teams advance to the:

Semifinals: June 19. Winners play winners, losers play losers. All advance to the:

Finals: June 20. Winners play winners, losers play losers. #1 is the European champion and qualifies for the 2010 FIBA World Championship for Women.

For more information, see:

• The EuroBasket Women 2009 website. Current results and standings are posted on the home page.
• The entire tournament schedule.
• A diagram of the tournament structure
• Links to the 16 participating teams
• The Turkish National team website. If you're looking for information about Kristen, remember that her Turkish name is Nevin Nevlin.

Latvia  is in far northern Europe, about the same latitude as Sitka, Alaska. Kristen tweets that the long daylight hours are messin' her.

The Turkish team has already played two pre-competition friendly games. They lost to Latvia 84-67, in spite of Kristen's 20 points. They defeated Ukraine  82-76; Kristen had 10 points and five rebounds.