City of Basketball Love

Andrew Robinson (@ADRobinson3)
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PHILADELPHIA >> There are two very notable trends on the West Chester women’s basketball roster this season.

The first is that the Golden Rams are very young, with eight players carrying either freshman or sophomore eligibility and the other is that their backcourt is about as New Jersey as it gets with six guards from the Garden State. It’s led to some interesting lineup combinations for coach Keira Wooden and some spirited practices but it’s a group that’s starting to gain some traction.

With five underclassmen -  three of them guards from Jersey - taking charge in the fourth quarter, West Chester rallied past host Jefferson in an all-Rams affair 58-54 Sunday afternoon.

“We play freely and none of us are afraid to make mistakes,” sophomore guard Ava Mazur said. “We’re all young, we’re all learning and there’s always room for improvement no matter what age you are, so I think age doesn’t really matter, just be yourself.”

West Chester outscored Jefferson 19-9 in the final frame behind the five of freshmen Jordin Tate and Lena Stein playing as the posts and the New Jersey trio of Mazur and freshmen Liv Mauz and Macie McCracken in the backcourt. They turned Jefferson over seven times, all of them off live-ball steals, and all five players had at least two points in the comeback effort.

“I put that lineup in because I thought we weren’t doing what I needed us to do defensively,” Wooden said. “That third quarter, I thought (Jefferson) was exposing some things with some dribble-drive actions and some things we weren’t doing a good enough job of defending so I went with some youth, some athleticism, moved a guard to a post and changed some matchups. I thought they responded very well.”

All six of the team’s Jersey guards saw time on Sunday. Bella Mazur, Ava’s twin sister, and freshman Kimi Sayson started while Ava Mazur, McCracken and Mauz came off the bench as did Marianna Papazoglou, also a newcomer this year as a graduate transfer from Penn.

It’s not like West Chester hasn’t had success in New Jersey before. Leah Johnson, a 2024 grad and the program’s all-time leading scorer, hails from Columbus, NJ but Wooden joked she used to get grief for not recruiting across the river enough.

Safe to say that’s changed.

“Now I think more of my roster is Jersey than Pennsylvania these days,” Wooden said with a laugh. “The Jersey girls bring a different kind of grit, they can play both ends of the floor, they can definitely score. Each one of them brings something different and they all compliment each other very well.”

Bella Mazur, who made her first five shots and hit 6-of-7 overall, led the Golden Rams with 12 points on Sunday while McCracken had 10 with half of them coming in the fourth quarter. Nine different players scored for West Chester in total, with the New Jersey guards combining on 41 points.

It’s a young roster but a unified one. Whether that’s sharing the same class or being from the same state or even just a part of the program as a whole, West Chester has started to build some continuity in its 3-2 start.

“I like how all the girls are close,” Mauz said. “All of the freshmen, we’re a really close class but I feel like we’re just as close with the upperclassmen and throughout the year, we’re going to build really good chemistry with each other.”

Aside from Ava and Bella Mazur, who are from Linwood and were standouts at Mainland Regional, none of the team’s players from New Jersey played on the same high school teams. Papazoglou and McCracken are the closest, both hailing from North Wildwood, but Papazoglou played at Wildwood Catholic and McCracken at Wildwood High School.

So while they were aware of each other and might have even played against each other in high school or AAU, the Jersey six still had to get on the same page with each other and the rest of their teammates in preseason. 

“From the beginning, our coaches have said once you guys get to know each other, it’s going to change everything,” McCracken said. “I think they saw we would connect on a whole new level and it would lead us to be really successful this year.”

Sayson, from the northern part of the state in Oceanport, NJ, has started all five games at point guard. The former standout at Shore Regional is shooting 38.9 percent on threes, the lead among all Golden Rams players.

It’s not just the New Jersey underclassmen who are contributing. Stein, who played an integral role on Perk Valley’s PIAA title team last year, has started all five games and leads West Chester in scoring at 11.6 ppg and rebounds at 5.2 per game, is tied with junior Erin Daley - a Plymouth Whitemarsh alum - for the lead in minutes per game while playing her usual tenacious defense. Tate, who is from Wilmington, Delaware, is the third freshman to have started all five games and is tied for second in rebounds per game.

Mauz, who hails from Williamstown and holds the program’s all-time scoring record at Williamstown High School, added that whatever the Golden Rams build this year will also benefit them in the future.

“This is going to help us for the next couple of years because we’re so young,” Mauz said. “Having this chance to start playing with each other now also helps us in the future and I hope it leads into us playing well in the PSAC.”

Wooden is a firm believer in a tough nonleague schedule and she didn’t back down from that even with an underclassmen-heavy team this year. West Chester has played a pair of Division I opponents in St. Joe’s and La Salle plus Sunday’s matchup with a Jefferson team that’s an annual contender in the CACC and a regular in the NCAA Tournament.

The biggest thing Wooden and assistant coaches Allison Hostetter and Mary Fromhartz have stressed, especially with the six freshmen, is that things they could get away with in high school likely won’t be there anymore. 

“They are eager,” Wooden said. “They work hard, they like to play defense, they’re eager to learn and they’re very coachable. All my kids are coachable but it’s all new and fresh to them so they’re relishing the information and want to get better.”

Similar to how players from Philadelphia take a lot of pride in their roots and try to live up to the city’s history in the game, players from New Jersey have a high standard to represent their upbringing. North Jersey or South Jersey, shore or metropolitan or any other barometer, there’s also plenty of intra-Garden State competitiveness and that has certainly seeped into West Chester’s practices.

“I’ll start with that one,” Mazur said as Mauz and McCracken laughed. “Last practice, Macie hit like six threes in all of our faces and it’s that competitive nature we all have that now I want to go guard her because I don’t want her to go hit another three. We all joke around, we all do that to each other. One practice it’s Liv, one practice it’s my sister Bella, it’s just a really fun, competitive environment to be around because we all hype each other up.

“Honestly, Coach Kee and Coach Hoss have to kind of calm us down during practice because we might be hyping each other up too much.”

Each player had their own reasons for committing to West Chester but they did start to notice a trend.

“Ava and Bella are a year older, so I was excited to play with them,” McCracken said. “After I had committed, I saw Liv committed and I’d played against her almost my whole life so now I had an opportunity to play with all these girls that we’d all kind of grown up playing against each other, so it’s really cool to build something together.”

Jefferson dropped its second straight after a 4-0 start after the Rams lost their CACC opener at Felician on Wednesday. The Rams are still forming their new identity after the graduation of last year’s senior group, one that included two CACC Player of the Year recipients, took plenty of production and experience with it.

Redshirt junior Emily Spratt, a second-year starter, and redshirt sophomore Gabby Recinto have taken the lead so far. Spratt, a CB West alum, had a game-high 19 points on Sunday with 11 of them coming in the third quarter for her fourth game of at least 19 points so far this season.

Recinto, who is also from New Jersey as a former standout at Cherokee and who started much of the season last year, tallied a double-double with 18 points and 14 rebounds which was her third already this season.

Redshirt junior Tori Nigro is also a second-year starter at point guard while redshirt junior Jordyn Thomas and redshirt sophomore Carolyn Sipprell were part of the rotation last season and have moved into the starting five early this year. 

West Chester entered the fourth trailing 45-39 but Tate forced a turnover on Jefferson’s first two possessions of the quarter and began chipping away. A pull-up three on the break by McCracken cut the lead to 45-43 and ignited the Golden Rams’ bench with 7:06 left but a bucket by Spratt still had Jefferson in front 49-46 with 4:53 to go.

Mauz came up with back-to-back steals, the first getting Stein a pair of free throws and the second leading to McCracken slicing through the paint for a layup and 50-49 lead. 

“Even in practice, our coaches do a good job of not calling fouls to make us get comfortable and get used to not getting calls,” Mazur said. “On the other end, we’re being gritty and getting those steals and I think it translates into the games as well.” 

Thomas tipped in a miss for Jefferson with 2:50 left for a 51-50 lead but Ava Mazur responded by attacking the rim and drawing the foul on a layup for the go-ahead score. West Chester survived two looks by Jefferson, with Stein grabbing the rebound off the second stop and pushing the ball only to make a late dish to Mauz who knocked down a short jumper for a three-point edge.

It wasn’t an easy finish to the game. Jefferson sophomore Kaci Mikulski, a Wildwood Catholic alum, drew a shooting foul on a three and knocked down all her free throws to cut the lead to 57-54 with 9.5 seconds left.

West Chester called a timeout to advance the ball but was hit with a five-second call on the inbound, turning the ball over. Jefferson got a look to tie but it was off the mark, allowing Tate to secure the last rebound of the come-from-behind win.

Although the Golden Rams probably won’t be changing their name to West Jersey/Chester anytime soon, don’t expect the New Jersey or underclassmen influence to diminish this season.

“It makes it really fun,” Mauz said. “Having a group of girls like this, all of us hype each other up, I’m not really afraid to make a mistake because I know they’ll be there for me.”