A-K Valley girls hoops teams struggle through challenges

By: HSSN Staff
Saturday, January 19, 2019 | 3:30 PM

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John Broderick became something like a college coach in his first two seasons as Springdale’s girls basketball coach, leaving his Fox Chapel teaching job at midday to sit in Springdale’s cafeteria and recruit players.

He had some success but then would find himself in the same position the next year: with barely enough players to fill out a roster. In 2016-17, Broderick’s second season, the Dynamos postponed their first handful of games as they searched for players.

Eventually the process began to wear on Broderick, until he determined enough was enough, establishing a mandatory registration deadline with no exceptions for stragglers.

“I’m at a total loss,” Broderick said. “When we were growing up — now, granted, I graduated high school in 1975 — but kids liked to participate in sports, and they liked to be on teams. Kids wanted to play, they wanted to compete, they wanted to be out there. For some reason — at least girls at this school, and there are some other schools who are struggling as well — they don’t seem to want to do that. And frankly, we can’t understand why.”

Low numbers are just one of a handful of problems for several Alle-Kiski Valley girls basketball teams this winter.

The programs at Burrell, Highlands, Kiski Area, Leechburg, Springdale, St. Joseph and Valley are going through various levels of rebuilding, and some of the numbers aren’t entirely pretty: an 18-79 collective record through Friday, including 5-43 in section play.

“I’ve seen some frustration, but if I didn’t see frustration, then I’d be concerned,” Highlands coach Courtney Udanis said. “I’ve seen some frustration, but I try to tell them, ‘You guys have to understand.’ … We constantly talk to them, we try to keep them lifted up.”

The programs have varying levels of recent success: Leechburg (5-8, 2-3 Section 3-A) made the WPIAL playoffs the last three seasons and the PIAA tournament the last two; St. Joseph (1-13, 1-4 Section 3-A) made the postseason eight of the last nine years, advancing to the WPIAL semifinals and PIAA tournament in 2017; and Burrell (4-9, 2-6 Section 1-4A) was a dominant program from 2011-17 with six straight postseasons, including three WPIAL semifinal berths, a WPIAL championship game appearance and four PIAA playoff trips.

Others have been searching for positives for years: Valley (2-13, 0-8 Section 3-3A) last made the playoffs in 2003 and has a 58-game section losing streak dating to 2014-15; Springdale (0-14, 0-7 Section 2-2A) last qualified in 2013 and hasn’t won more than six games in a season since; Kiski Area (4-10, 0-7 Section 2-5A) has a postseason drought that dates to 2012, the last of four straight appearances, and 24 wins in the seven seasons since; and Highlands (2-12, 0-8 Section 1-4A) missed the playoffs eight of the last nine seasons.

The rest of this season, the teams will be building for the future and fighting the issues that have cropped up.

Inexperience

Leechburg is coming off the best four-season run in school history, which included the Blue Devils’ first two WPIAL playoff wins, their first two PIAA tournament appearances and their first state playoff victory.

One problem: All that success came through a core of six players who graduated after the 2017-18 season, leaving new coach Andre Carter with little experience to work with when he got the job in August. On top of that, Leechburg didn’t participate in a summer program.

“A lot of times in a program where they get to work over the summer and everything, people are getting better over the summer,” Carter said. “Whereas we really weren’t able to do that, so we were kind of behind the 8-ball. Even since I took over in August, with us being such a small school, we weren’t getting many girls in for open gyms to even develop or work on their skills. So by the time the season started, we had missed two to three months.”

Inexperience looms large at several schools, where coaches are relying on starters with no prior varsity experience.

Burrell is surrounding senior Kaylen Sharrow with mostly freshmen and sophomores. Kiski Area has a pair of experienced players in senior Dara Zelonka and junior Hannah Potter but inexperience around them. Highlands and Valley likewise are dealing with inexperience.

At St. Joseph, the Spartans lost four starters to graduation and the fifth to transfer. Many of the players remaining are new not just to varsity basketball but basketball itself.

“Having kids that really have not played basketball since fourth or fifth grade, trying to get them to a high school level is a huge challenge,” St. Joseph coach Dennis Jones said. “You’re playing against kids that have played for five years, six years or at least recently. And there’s just no comparison. Basketball-wise, we’re at like sixth or seventh grade, even though we’re 10th- and 11th-grade kids. There’s just a huge, huge discrepancy.”

Jones is trying to teach his players the fundamentals of basketball. Udanis is working more on the little things, mainly scoring and preventing turnovers, which in turn lead to easy opponent baskets. Kiski Area coach Nick Dizon is striving for consistency.

“We’re starting to do things we’ve really been preaching better,” Dizon said. “We’re paying attention to the details, communicating, but it’s a process and I feel we have a lot of growing pains. Some days we do things well, but we struggle to put complete games together. That’s our biggest downfall right now.”

Many of the schools don’t have consistent feeder programs, providing one reason for inexperience.

“When you don’t know what you’re supposed to do or how you’re supposed to play because you haven’t done it all your life, so to speak, it’s hard for a coach to (teach),” Valley coach Ernie Sipolino said. “There’s no basketball IQ, there’s nothing going on and they’re just running around out there.”

Injuries

Burrell already had to deal with inexperience surrounding Sharrow, one of the Alle-Kiski Valley’s top players, and fellow senior Grace Omecinski.

Then injuries began to crop up. The Bucs are playing without starters Omecinski and freshmen Hope Clark and Allison Fisher, while playing in a section that includes Class 4A No. 1 North Catholic and No. 4 Freeport.

“You take three of our top six out, and now we’re playing kids that aren’t quite ready for varsity basketball,” Burrell coach Joel Ceraso said. “I give them credit in the sense that they show up and they give effort, but you see what we’re up against: really good teams that aren’t going to take it easy on us because we’re hurt. So we just have to deal with it.”

Long-term injuries to three of St. Joseph’s anticipated top players are compounding the Spartans’ inexperience problem.

Leechburg also was missing one of its top players, Kat Yurjevich, with an illness. The senior recently returned and helped the Blue Devils earn back-to-back wins.

“I think they’re finally figuring out their roles, and they’re starting to play more as a team,” Carter said. “They’re really gelling right now, and I think that we’re correcting our little mistakes and they’re realizing they can’t do everything by themselves.”

Numbers

At one point last season, Broderick had a dozen players at Springdale. Now, he has half that. One player moved, some just didn’t come out, and the fourth-year coach can’t explain the situation.

“We’ve tried everything that we can think of,” he said. “We’ve shortened practices. In my four years, we’ve never had a practice on Saturday with kids who maybe have to get jobs. We’ve bent over backwards two times to try to encourage the kids to come out, but for some reason they’re not.”

Broderick said one potential player came to him about coming out for the team after he set a deadline this year, more than a week into tryouts. He held firm.

“We’re pleased as can be with the six girls that we have,” Broderick said. “They’re great kids. They work hard. We can see them getting better every single day.”

He also said coaches — whether they encourage an athlete to specialize in one sport over playing multiple or run the score up against an overmatched opponent — play a factor in some players’ reluctance to come out and play.

“It kind of dawns on me that nobody plays sports, at least not enough kids, play for fun anymore,” Broderick said. “It seems like they’re playing it because someone somewhere told them if you do this sport all year round for enough years, you’ll get whatever.”

While other schools don’t have the number issues that Springdale has, they would like to see more come out at some point.

“I’m just attributing it to there’s no feeder system,” Sipolino said. “That’s the only thing I can point to. You didn’t get their interest early.”

One potential positive on that front is at Kiski Area, which struggled immensely with numbers in recent years but now has a 15-player roster. While Dizon doesn’t yet see the numbers he did when he was an assistant at Gateway, he believes the investment in the elementary and junior high programs led by former coach Nick Ionadi is beginning to pay off.

“We have a lot of kids that are interested in playing,” Dizon said. “I think we’re pretty close, to be honest. I really think that if we stay dedicated, if we stay focused on getting better each game, we have a good blend of players where we can hopefully turn it around and win some games this year but also be ready to take a bigger step next year.”

Wait ’til next year

Ceraso knows about program transformations — he oversaw one of the biggest in the A-K Valley at Leechburg. The Blue Devils went 1-17 in 2013-14, his first season, even getting shut out in a game against Ford City, then proceeded to win 58 games over the next four seasons.

He sees the positives coming at Burrell, too, where the Bucs were showing signs of contending for a playoff spot before the injury bug bit.

“These ninth-graders, the process for them is to adjust to the physicality of the game, to the speed of the game, to the fact that these kids jump passing lanes faster,” Ceraso said. “I think that’s it: it’s just the physicality of it and the speed of it. And then from there, it grows their game.”

While Broderick is in his fourth year at Springdale, the other six coaches — Carter, Ceraso, Dizon, Jones, Sipolino and Udanis — are in their first seasons and say they already are seeing some progress. For instance, were the WPIAL playoffs to begin today, Leechburg would make its fourth consecutive appearance.

As for the coming years, Burrell showcased the future of its program Thursday with a halftime show of the elementary school program players.

Carter and Dizon also said their youth programs are showing promise: Carter employs some of those players as team managers and statisticians, and Dizon said Kiski Area’s junior high players worked out with his varsity players over the summer.

Sipolino said he’s seen improvement in attitude and effort, and Broderick, Jones and Udanis are seeing the skill development they hope for.

While the results on the scoreboard might not be where they want them yet, the coaches remain optimistic about the future.

“We’re focusing on the little victories,” said Udanis, who as a junior helped Highlands snap a 33-year playoff drought in 2008. “We’re able to run plays now. At the beginning of the year, these girls had no idea how to run a play. Now we’re actually able to. We look more organized. We’re looking for more small victories than the actual outcome of the game.”

Doug Gulasy is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Doug at dgulasy@tribweb.com or via Twitter @dgulasy_Trib.

Tags: Burrell, Highlands, Kiski School, Leechburg, Springdale, St. Joseph, Valley