By Marc Pruitt
MaxPreps.com
Rebuild or reload?
As is the case with most successful basketball programs, the graduation of key personnel year after year can leave some gaping holes. One might think that would have been the case with the Bishop McGuinness girls basketball team, winners of the last two 1-A state championships, when all-everything guard Katheryn Lyons graduated and took her talents to the University of Maryland.
But the Villains are proving this season that there is more to their program than Lyons, a key member of the last two state championship teams, and more to them than Sarah Faroudi and Margaret Minton, also key contributors who graduated last year.
McGuinness, located in Kernersville, has seemingly breezed to each state championship; it began the season with winning a third straight title as a realistic goal. McGuinness capped a perfect 31-0 season in 2005-06 with a 54-31 drubbing of Southeast Halifax in the championship game, then followed that up with a 32-1 record and another title-game romp, 79-42 against East Bladen.
When the 2007-08 season started, six members of the Villains had been a part of the standard of success that Coach Brian Robinson has brought to the team.
Now in his sixth season, Robinson knows that expectations are high for his program; he challenged his players to maintain the level of excellence that McGuinness has enjoyed lately.
“The challenge for this team was to develop its own identity,” Robinson said. “Not by trying to live up to expectations of outsiders, but to try and live up to our program’s standards.”
Maggie Ronan, Erinn Thompson, Gina Simmons, Brittany Cox, Megan Rembielak, and Anna DeFrancesco were a part of both championship teams and grabbed hold of the leadership reigns at the outset of the season, both on and off the court.
McGuinness has six newcomers on its roster this season, including two freshmen that see significant minutes.
Heading into this week’s Northwest 1-A conference tournament, the Villains had a 19-6 record. The six losses are more than the last two seasons combined, but they never shook the team’s determination.
Robinson always schedules tough opponents for his team, and this year’s lineup was no exception. Losses have comes at the hands of Greensboro Grimsley, the runner-up in the 4-A state championship game last year; Greensboro Dudley, a perennial 3-A power; West Charlotte, ranked among the top 4-A teams this season in North Carolina; Bishop McNamara from Forestville, Md., and two prominent Ohio programs in Mount Notre Dame and Chaminade-Julienne at a tournament in Berlin, Ohio, in January.
“We have been able to find positives from each defeat,” Robinson said. “We lost to six good teams and each one of those teams has exposed an area of our game that we needed work on, whether it was handling the press, feeding the ball more into the post, how to rotate better on defense or just keeping our composure in tight games. Each loss has kept us grounded and humble, but for a program that has been used to winning, it has also kept us hungry and attentive.”
Thompson, a 6-foot-3 junior who is drawing recruiting interest from several top Division I programs, said the early loss to Grimsley stung, but also it redirected the team’s focus.
“Losing to them so early in the season really sent us a message,” Thompson said. “I don’t think we really understood how it could be taken away from us so quickly. We’re haven’t been accustomed to losing a lot of games around here. It wasn’t a feeling any of us liked, but we learned a lot from it.”
Ronan is in her fourth varsity season and has been a co-captain for the last two. She also feels the biggest challenge the team had at the outset of the season was developing chemistry.
“It was a whole different team this year,” Ronan said. “We’ve worked really hard to get our chemistry together. Coach has worked really hard to help us develop it. Pulling together on and off the court has been a staple of this program since I’ve been here, and this year proved to be more challenging because half our team is different than last year. Honestly, the tough schedule we’ve had has really helped. It has motivated us to practice harder and it’s made us all a lot stronger. We go twice as hard (in practice) now after a loss.”
Another hiccup occurred when DeFrancesco, who was the team’s starting point guard, tore her ACL in the second game of the season.
“A definite setback,” Thompson said. “Anna was a big part of our team and was great to have on the floor, but we’ve had some people step up.”
Two of those people are Kelly Bonner and Whitney Knight, freshmen who have made an immediate impact with the program.
“They’ve both been incredible and they are only going to get better,” Thompson added.
McGuinness, a private school located between Winston-Salem and Greensboro, is also considered persona non grata in its own conference. This is the third year it has competed in the public school league and has still yet to lose a conference game.
“We are getting everyone’s best shot,” Ronan said. “But we still have to go out and win games and take care of ourselves on the floor. We take things game-by-game. We definitely feel we are capable of winning the state championship again, but we have to win the conference tournament first. That is our focus right now.”
Marc Pruitt, a freelance sports writer for the Winston-Salem Journal, covers North Carolina for MaxPreps. He can be reached at MPruitt71@gmail.com.
