Youthful Hampton girls trying to build on recent surge

By: HSSN Staff
Thursday, February 7, 2019 | 8:00 PM

This season has been a learning experience for the Hampton girls basketball team, but the Talbots are showing signs of progress despite missing the playoffs in the four years under coach Tony Howard.

The team has showed positive signs recently, picking up three of its four wins in the past six games.

“We‘ve seen a lot of improvement this year,” Howard said. “A lot of good things. The girls are sharing the ball. It’s a little disappointing, a little bittersweet, I know it’s been a grind for us. To see how hard-working and coachable they’ve been, it’s disappointing it’s coming to an end.”

It ended too soon for the Talbots, who were in rebuilding mode after losing eight players to graduation, three of whom went on to play college basketball.

The schedule did them no favors, realigning WPIAL champion Gateway and state champion Mars together. The first four games of its January slate also included Franklin Regional and Plum, the top four teams in the section.

“We knew those four games would present a lot of challenges,” Howard said. “I would still say most of those games we really competed for a half, if not longer. We really took a lot of the teams out of what they like to do. I think the physicality just wore us down.”

It began a six-game slide for the Talbots that ultimately doomed their season.

“We didn’t know how to deal with what we had,” sophomore guard Olivia Bianco said. “It was very different from last year. We were used to winning and were shell-shocked. But I think we handled it well. Sometimes, we got down on ourselves and didn’t act the way we should have.”

Howard echoed that sentiment, having been a bit heavy-handed with his young team earlier in the season. Despite the young talent showing bursts of success, older, stronger and more experienced teams such as Franklin Regional, which has five senior starters, tired the Talbots over the course of a game.

“I was kind of tough on them earlier this year,” Howard said. “I wish I wasn’t, looking back on it.”

Bianco said the goal in the offseason is learning to play more of a complete game, something that comes with an extra year of training, both physically and mentally.

“We definitely have to learn to be consistent,” she said. “We’ll have really good quarters and halves. Then something just switches, and we get messed up. Or sometimes we get our heads down. But I feel as we go on and become more experienced, we won’t have as much trouble with that anymore.”

The team came together to win three of its next six after, and all agreed improvement was made across the board from a team in which its four leading scorers — Bianco, sophomore Kate Schmitt, and freshmen Sophie Kelly and Kayla Hoehler — all figure to contribute for years to come.

“We’ve had two or three games where we had four double-digit scorers,” Howard said. “In 12 years, I think I saw four girls in double digits in a game once.”

Bianco thinks the Talbots can take the experience from this year and put it into the offseason.

“As the season went on,” Bianco said, “we learned how to come together and realize we can be more than everyone said we could be.”

Devon Moore is a freelance writer.

Tags: Hampton