City of Basketball Love

Andrew Robinson (@ADRobinson3)
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EAST WHITELAND >> There was no question who the ball was going to, even if that person was questioning whether they should be getting the ball in the first place.

On her team’s previous offensive possession, Immaculata sophomore Carly Coleman had missed a layup that would have given the Mighty Macs a three-point lead, with visiting Marymount then going down and scoring the go-ahead basket with 24.2 seconds left. With her teammates hyping her up and her coaches drawing up a look just for her, Coleman shook off the doubt and tapped into the clutch gene she’s shown plenty of this year.

Coleman’s short jumper with 15 seconds left proved the go-ahead basket as Immaculata edged Marymount 63-60 in a battle of Atlantic East Conference unbeatens Wednesday night in Alumnae Hall.

“I definitely feel like I play better when the game is tighter or it’s against a better opponent,” Coleman said. “I know you’ll miss your shots, whatever, you just have to keep shooting through them and that’s something I’ve been told by my coaches and teammates to just keep going.”

Coleman, on the heels of the best game of her career over the weekend, followed it up with another outstanding performance in what’s already been a remarkable season for the sophomore. Including the game-winning basket, Coleman finished Wednesday’s thriller with 22 points, 10 rebounds, three assists, four blocks, four steals and just two turnovers in 37 minutes of play.

She was incredible in the second half, putting up 16 points on 7-of-11 shooting after halftime while continuing another season-long trend of raising her level in the pivotal moments. Coleman posted nine points in the third quarter then followed up with seven points, two rebounds, two blocks and a steal in the final frame.

“Last year, we came off a championship and a high but I knew we’d need people to step up and over the summer, I kind of took over that role,” Coleman said. “I was getting a lot of jump shot reps up because last year, I was just driving but this year, I’m looking to create more and open up more by taking that jump shot.”

What Coleman has done for Immaculata this season has been foundational. She’s one of two returning starters from last year’s AEC championship team that reached the NCAA Tournament and is one of the Mighty Macs’ team captains as a sophomore, so her impact is wide-ranging.

Following Wednesday’s win, Immaculata owns a 13-3 record and improved to 5-0 in the AEC despite some significant personnel losses from a year ago. Coleman has helped carry that start while leading the team in almost every statistical category from points per game (17.9) to rebounding (10.8 rpg) and assists (62), to steals, blocks and even minutes played.

Mighty Macs coach Brittany Whalen knew she was getting a college-ready player from a winning program at Cardinal O’Hara, with Coleman quickly showing she could be even more than that.

“She’s a competitor, she has the will to win, she had a little bit of a shaky first half but she always comes alive for us in the second half, especially in the last few games,” Whalen said. “I do believe sometimes she doesn’t have the confidence in herself but it’s a matter of, not even just the coaches, but her teammates pushing her constantly and confiding in her; we want the ball in her hands at the end of a game.”

Entering play Wednesday, Coleman was one of just 13 players nationally across Division III to have recorded a triple-double this season. The sophomore had her first career triple double on Jan. 10 when she put up 17 points, 10 rebounds and 11 assists against Gwynedd Mercy University, two years to the day since the Mighty Macs’ last triple-double.

In her last game prior to Wednesday, all the sophomore had done was post a career-high 34 points - the second-highest single game total in the program’s storied history - that included 15 fourth quarter points and the go-ahead basket for good measure. She’s been the AEC Player of the Week the last two weeks, has been the conference Defensive Player of the Week twice this year and twice more made the weekly honor roll.

Wednesday also marked her 10th double-double of the season and she’s in the upper tier nationally for that category as well. O’Hara won three state titles in her four years with the Lions and practicing every day against Division I players like Maggie Doogan, Annie Welde and Sydni Scott then becoming a staple in the starting lineup herself alongside other future Division I players in Molly Rullo, Joan Quinn, and Megan Rullo showed Coleman the value of impacting a game beyond scoring.

“I definitely took my rebounding from O’Hara to here, I knew if you rebound the ball, you’ll get more playing time and that will create a lot of opportunities for your team,” Coleman said. “O’Hara, even the PCL in general, it prepares you so well for any sport in the future so I think the foundation they put in me definitely carried into my college career.”

For everything she had done this season, there was one thing noticeably missing from her college resume at tip-off time Wednesday night. In her first 40 games, she’d never hit a three-point shot and had been 0-of-9 overall behind the arc in that span.

With Marymount playing in a zone and playing off her on the perimeter, Coleman made some personal history when she drained her first three, both of the game and her career, on a late shot clock swish with 4:05 left in the third quarter. That one got a little bit of a reaction out of the normally stoically game-faced Coleman.

“It was a great feeling honestly, I couldn’t stop smiling after I hit it,” Coleman said, fighting hard to hold back a laugh. “Even the bench got into it. They’re always saying ‘Carly, you can shoot it,’ and I’ll say ‘yeah, I can shoot it,’ but I’ll mostly be in the paint during games so there’s not really an opportunity to but again, my teammates giving me the ball, letting me go and not even thinking about it is what I need to do.”

While Coleman can shoot the ball, Whalen said she actually has to push the sophomore to look for that shot in games and was thrilled she finally did so on Wednesday, taking three total attempts from deep. Immaculata plays the 5-foot-10 Coleman in the frontcourt where she’s a mismatch of many varieties, either too quick for a post to stick with going to the rim or too big for a guard to square up with when she shoots over them.

“She can play ‘1’ through ‘5,’ she’s typically our inbounder in the backcourt and there have been times where if a team presses us, we’ll reverse the ball and she’ll dribble it up the floor like she’s our starting point guard,” Whalen said. “She has more confidence and capability than she thinks and she’s just willing to do whatever it takes to win a game and to execute and perform out there.

“We’re just so lucky to have a player like her along with the rest of the girls. They’re just gelling nicely and we’ve had a couple tough road games we were able to pull away with a win and it’s the resilience and the fight in them that they’re not giving up even in the close game moments.”

Immaculata sophomore Carly Coleman, a Cardinal O'Hara graduate, is leading the Mighty Macs in plenty of categories on the court but also off the floor as a team captain. (Photo courtesy of Johnathan Fervier)

It’s permeated out across the lineup as well.  Center Megan Robbins is having her best season as a junior, senior Olivia Ettore is second only to Coleman in scoring and senior guard Cassidy Riley has played well filling a lot of roles as the veterans in the starting lineup.

“They’re running me off screens or just using my speed to get to the rim, we have plays for everybody that can go off it,” Coleman said. “Abby (Grillo)’s been using them, I think we go great together, Liv can use them as well, I think Britt’s just really been planning well around all of us.”

Filling Coleman’s role from last year as the impact freshman in the lineup is Abby Grillo. A 5-foot-10 guard from Delaware who played at Padua Academy and AAU for the Comets, Grillo is a mirror of Coleman in a lot of ways. The freshman burst onto the scene with a 30-point game in her debut and contributed an important 12 points and four assists in Wednesday’s win.

“She’s going to have an amazing career here,” Coleman said. “I knew I could take her under my wing, try to give her the confidence, she can knock down any shot and I trust her with any shot so she’s been a great addition to our team this year.”

Outside of the starting lineup, Immaculata has a pretty young team with seven freshmen on the roster. That puts Coleman in a unique position, she’s more than established herself as a top performer on the court but she’s also still an underclassman so her role as captain allows her to bridge the two age groups on the team.

That’s an area Whalen has seen the sophomore really excel this year. 

“That was part of the decision in making her a captain this year, obviously being a sophomore, that’s a big promotion going into the season,” Whalen said. “We had high expectations of her, we know she’s a great athlete but also still being a sophomore, she was the one we saw bridging that gap between the seven sophomores and our seniors. She’s done such an excellent job of it, her communication skills have improved so much throughout the course of the year.”

Last year, Coleman was a two-sport athlete at Immaculata like she was at Cardinal O’Hara playing soccer in the fall then moving indoors for the winter. With the college seasons being longer, Coleman said it was a lot to manage, and she ended up missing almost a month of preseason work with the basketball team last year, so she made a difficult decision to hang up the soccer cleats and focus on basketball.

Being named a team captain, she also thought it was important that she be present at every step of this season’s journey. She had the luxury of being a more subdued producer on a team led by fifth-year players and seniors - many of them with big personalities and a few of them still regulars in the stands at Mighty Macs home games - but that’s not the case now with that freshman group looking to her for guidance.

“Britt told me I lead by example and that’s exactly what I try to do on the court,” Coleman said. “This year I’m also working on talking and communicating with my team so we can prepare for the future and I think her giving me that role is going to help me but also help us a lot.”

The way that Coleman “finds ways to win” has certainly left an impression on her coaches, especially when she does it against teams doing their best to take something she does well away, just like Marymount did with her driving on Wednesday. After the Saints took the lead, Whalen took a timeout and she didn’t think twice about drawing up a play designed for Coleman.

Cassidy set a good screen up top, Coleman was able to back toward the rim off a couple dribbles, spin into the lane and put up one of the jumpers she’s worked so much on with the game on the line.

“After I missed the layup before I was like ‘Oh gosh, why do I have to shoot it?’ But they kept telling me, ‘It’s going in, it’s going in,’ and I told myself, ‘Yeah, it is,’” Coleman said. “They just ran me off a screen, my fadeaway had gone in earlier in the game, so I knew it would work again.

“On the layup, I had expected (a defender) to lean into me or some contact but I still fell short of it and I thought ‘I can’t go out like this in this game.’”

What made Coleman the happiest after the win? It wasn’t the fact that she’d hit the game-winner, recorded another double-double or gotten her first collegiate three-pointer to go down.

What made the captain happiest was when Whalen awarded the “Mac Medallion” for player of the game to the team’s bench for their unending support through all 40 minutes. Marymount may have come in with an overall sub-.500 record at 7-8 but the Saints were 4-0 in the AEC and went blow-for-blow with the Mighty Macs, paced by an excellent game from Chandler Eddleton, so any source of energy Immaculata could get was crucial.

“The bench is something that gets overlooked but they kept us in the game,” Coleman said. “They were screaming, yelling, they’re great people backing us up. I’ve seen it with my own eyes when I used to cheer on Maggie, Annie, Syd and after they’d make shots, us cheering for them makes them make the next one so I think now hearing them do it for me is special.”

Whalen said it was hard to think of a day where the coaches haven’t seen Coleman in the gym getting up extra shots but what’s equally caught their eyes is that she’s usually bringing a teammate with her. Coleman does it because she doesn’t want to settle where she is but also because it creates another opportunity to spend time with her teammates.

She had opportunities to play for other programs, including some very strong ones at the D-III level but ultimately found a home at Immaculata. Whether it’s teammates from last year prying open a door clear across the gym to shout her out mid-interview, the girls on the bench pouring their energy into rallying her on the court or the coaches putting the ball in her hands to go win a game even if she’s not sure it should be her shot to take, it’s the place she was meant to be.

“It’s the people that I’ve met,” Coleman said. “We’re teammates but even better, we have stronger friendships. The coaches, they’re awesome, we go to our coach’s office multiple times per week to talk about whatever we want so I think her allowing us to have those kinds of relationships outside of basketball is amazing.”