Golden girl Massengale shines for Team USA

Bolingbrook (Ill.) High School point guard Ariel Massengale was already a hot recruiting prospect in women‘s college basketball circles before Team USA won FIBA World Championship gold.

But now, the recruiting fires might be hotter than hot.

Massengale, a rising senior who has won gold medals in two consecutive summers with the U16 and U17 national teams, led Team USA with 22 points in a 97-74 semifinal-round win over China and 20 points in the gold-medal game, a 92-62 victory over France on July 25.

“Those last two games, she really showed the world she is one of the best point guards in the country,” said Anthony Smith, her coach at Bolingbrook.



Team USA won all eight games in the first-ever FIBA World Championship for Women at the U17 level.

Massengale started all eight games, averaging 22.5 points per game and totaling a team-high 43 assists against 16 turnovers.

“Words cannot explain how I feel,” Massengale said. “It‘s just a great honor and we are all blessed to have had this opportunity to do something like this.”

She was not alone in a memorable summer that took her from Bolingbrook to Colorado Springs, Colo., for the U17 trials camp, and to Alagon, Spain, for three international exhibition games, and then to Toulouse and Rodez, France, for the World Championships.

Playing alongside her was Bolingbrook teammate Morgan Tuck, a rising junior and highly recruited forward who led the Illinois Class 4A champion Raiders with an 18.1 points-per-game average in 2009-10.

“The best part is being able to travel with people that you get along with,” Tuck said. “You build friendships that we are going to have forever.”



To have one player from a high school team make the national team is one thing, but two?

“That was great for the whole town, the whole community,” Smith said.

And joining in with a gold performance of her own was Jewell Loyd, a guard from nearby Niles West (Skokie, Ill.) in the western Chicago suburbs.

Loyd was a late replacement for the injured Alexyz Vaioletama of Mater Dei (Santa Ana, Calif.). Loyd came off the bench in all eight games, and led the bench players with 8.6 points per game and 11 steals.

“It was awesome,” Loyd said. “We all feel like a family.”

Massengale and Tuck have led Bolingbrook to consecutive state championships and they‘ll certainly be favored for a three-peat title in 2010-11.



Since Massengale arrived as a freshman, the Raiders have posted an 81-8 record. She scored a game-high 18 points and had a game-high 4 assists in Bolingbrook’s 60-50 win over Whitney Young in the 4A title game this past season.

Tuck, who quickly overcame an ACL injury she suffered in last year’s U16 national team trials, has dominated Chicago-area girls‘ basketball with her scoring and rebounding. Neither has committed yet to a college, but the scholarship offers are multiple.

“Everybody wants ‘em,” Smith said.

Among those: Kentucky, Georgia, Notre Dame and Stanford.

Massengale sensed that the same players she played with on the national team are the same players she‘ll see in her college years.

“My teammates and I are going to be playing against each other for years to come, and it was really great to become close and have that bond with certain people,” Massengale said.



“All of these girls are the best players in their high schools, and they learned how to give up the ‘me’ for the ‘we’ and play hard for the USA,” said Team USA head coach Barbara Nelson of Wingate University.

Recruiting: Joliet Catholic RB verbals to Illinois
* Josh Ferguson, a running back at Catholic Academy (Joliet, Ill.), has verbaled to Illinois, according to multiple reports. A 5-foot-10 rising senior, Ferguson rushed for 1,585 yards and 20 touchdowns last year for the 11-2 and Class 5A runners-up Hilltoppers. “It’s always been a dream of mine to play for Illinois,” Ferguson told the Chicago Sun-Times. Ferguson’s other scholarship offers included Ball State, Toledo and Ohio, all of the Mid-American Conference. His play in a summer camp at the University of Illinois reportedly sold the Illini coaches on him.

* There is no word yet on where Vernon Hills receiver DaVaris Daniels, perhaps the highest recruited senior in the Chicago area, will commit for college. Various online reports have him favoring Miami, Notre Dame and Oklahoma. He was ready to announce his commitment to Miami in June, but canceled the news conference. He has received at least a dozen major-college scholarship offers. The delay in Daniels’ decision may involve Georgia, where his dad, Phillip, now a defensive end with the Washington Redskins, attended. Georgia has not offered a scholarship, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other reports. Phillip Daniels has gone on Georgia fan boards to publicly campaign for his son.

Storylines around Illinois:
* Michael Redlicki of Hawthorn Woods, Ill., a rising junior at Lake Zurich, won a national tennis title at the USTA National Clay Court Championships in Delray Beach, Fla. Redlicki defeated Gordon Watson 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 in the championship match of the boys’ 16 singles. Redlicki, who previously won the USA Midwest Closed Boys title, will compete in the USA Boys National Tennis Championships beginning Aug. 6 at Kalamazoo (Mich.) College.

* A grand slam hit in the first inning by tournament MVP Ryan Powers helped send Nazareth to a 9-2 win over Streamwood in the championship game of the Phil Lawler Summer Classic held at Benedictine University on Thursday. Pitcher Dominic Purpura, a rising junior, allowed no earned runs in five innings. “We‘re the little 3A school. To prove all the big guy wrong, it fuels the fire,” Purpura told the Chicago Sun-Times. Nazareth, which won 33 games in summer league play, was eliminated by Woodstock Marian in the Class 3A Supersectionals in the spring.

* Former University of Illinois and Lanphier High School player Rich McBride is a head basketball coach for the first time at Cairo, a Class 1A high school in southern Illinois. “Going back to middle school, I’ve always wanted to be a coach,” McBride told the State Journal-Register. McBride replaces Tommy Ellis, who stepped down as head coach last December after suffering a stroke.



* Sixteen-year-old Katherine Helper of Lincoln was the only golfing amateur among the top four finishers in the Illinois Women’s Open held at Mistwood Country Club in Romeoville. Helper, a rising junior at University (Chicago, Ill.), finished third with a 4-over score of 220 in the three-day tournament, three shots behind LPGA pros Allison Fouch and Nicole Jeray.

* Former Fremd (Palatine, Ill.) football star Nick Mitchell, now a senior center at Western Michigan University, is one of the nominees for the 2010 All-State Good Works Team. The 22-member team will be announced in September by the American Football Coaches Association.

Paul Bowker, a sports journalist for 25 years who has worked at newspapers nationwide, covers the Chicago area for MaxPreps. He may be reached at bowkerpaul1@aol.com.