City of Basketball Love

By David Comer
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On the surface, the Bryn Mawr women’s basketball team’s 73-68 overtime win over Washington College on January 14 doesn’t look like anything extraordinary. But when you look deeper into that Centennial Conference victory for the Owls, it was anything but ordinary.

The win was Bryn Mawr’s first league triumph since a 50-46 victory at Haverford on February 12, 2008 - a span of 6,546 days or 17 years, 11 months and 2 days.

“I’m just happy for them,” said fifth-year coach Carla Coleman, a star guard at Penn State in the early 1990s when the Lady Lions were one of the top programs in the country. “I want them to experience a little bit of what I experienced. To see their faces and to see their joy meant the world to me. It’s about them. I’m just along for the ride."

In that win over Washington College, Bryn Mawr trailed by 12 points entering the fourth quarter but battled back to tie the game in regulation and win it in overtime. The Owls made 19-of-26 from the foul line, and freshman guard Jenny Briggs scored 26 points and was 7-of-17 from deep.

“There’s just a resilience about this group,” Coleman said. “There are times when we have five freshmen on the floor. There are moments when I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ It’s a roller coaster ride, but it’s amazing to watch these young kids adapt so well and handle adversity.”

The Owls, whose roster includes nine freshmen, are 5-12 overall and 1-6 in the league as they look for their next Centennial Conference victory.

“I think the freshman class was 1-year-old the last time Bryn Mawr won a league game,” Coleman said. “It’s such a young team. I think for the most part how they’re feeling is that the monkey is off their back, and they can kind of move on.”

While at Penn State, Coleman was a key part of a team that was ranked No. 1 in the country, won two Big Ten championships and captured an Atlantic 10 title. She knows what it takes to win and is trying to impart that knowledge on her team.

“They don’t want to talk about what Bryn Mawr was,” Coleman said. “They want to talk about the present. That’s the culture. They don’t live in the past. They live in the present. We always talk about our goals, but we also talk about getting 1% better each day.”

Coleman worked for 21 years as a high school counselor in the Lower Merion School District. At Harriton, she also was an assistant girls’ basketball coach for two years and the head coach for eight more.

“I loved it,” she said.

But then the Bryn Mawr job opened, and Coleman said that her mentor, Chris Wielgus, with whom she coached at Harriton and who enjoyed a long and successful career as a Division I head coach, encouraged her to apply for the position.

“When your mentor tells you to do something, you just do it,” Coleman said.

Coleman applied and got the job. She is continuing to work to build the program into a consistent winner.

“It was a challenge, and I love challenges,” Coleman said. “I started with boots on the ground and just evaluated everything. I just decided to jump right in.” 

Coleman, who is also Bryn Mawr’s Athletics Diversity and Inclusion Designee, wanted to find a point guard similar to Tina Nicholson, who was her backcourt mate at Penn State. (Nicholson, now the head girls’ basketball coach at Coatesville, had a legendary high school career at Downingtown.)

Coleman identified Briggs, who is from the town of Waxhaw in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, and started recruiting her when she was a sophomore.

“The first piece for me was to find that point guard,” Coleman said. “She was the one that I coveted for this. I told her that she can help build this. That is what I sold her on. She’s a quiet kid. She doesn’t say a lot. If you look at her and line her up, you probably would not pick her out to be one of the top players on our team. She just has the ability to lead but lead from a very quiet demeanor, and that’s really the cornerstone of what I wanted to build.”

And on January 14, Briggs, a 5-foot-5 guard, who is averaging 11.4 points, 4.5 rebounds and 3.7 points per game this season, had her finest game as a college player and helped the Owls accomplish something that they had not done in nearly a generation.

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A crowd atop the Centennial Conference standings

Five games into the Centennial Conference men’s basketball schedule, and five teams are tied with identical 4-1 league records - Franklin & Marshall, Johns Hopkins, Ursinus, Swarthmore and Gettysburg.

Ursinus and Swarthmore meet at 8 PM tonight at Ursinus in a game that will be critical in the Centennial Conference standings. 

In the 10-team league, six teams make the conference’s postseason tournament, with the first- and second-place teams receiving first-round byes. The conference champion receives an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament.

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Several local players reach 1,000-point milestone

In a win over Stevenson on Saturday, Widener senior Lindsay Kutz finished with 20 points, 10 rebounds and 6 assists - but more significantly the 5-foot-8 guard from Pottsville surpassed 1,000 career points. Kutz is averaging 14.9 points and 8.3 rebounds per game for the Pride, who are 13-4 overall and 4-2 in the MAC Commonwealth despite their top player, Mia Robbins, playing in only the first six games of the season because of an injury.

Ursinus senior Mohamed Toure scored his 1,000th career point in a victory over Muhlenberg on January 21. The wiry 6-foot-6 guard from Washington D.C. is the 32nd player in program history to reach the 1,000-point mark. For the season, Toure is averaging 15.2 points and 6.2 rebounds per game for the Bears, who are 11-6 overall and 4-1 in the league.

Swarthmore senior Eddie Paquette also surpassed 1,000 career points recently, achieving the feat in a victory over McDaniel on January 17. Paquette, who became the 30th player in program history to reach the milestone, hit a pair of free throws with 2:27 left in the second half to get to 1,000. Paquette is the leading scorer at 15.2 points per game for the Garnet, who are 10-7 overall and 4-1 in the league.

“He’s just a gritty player and an extremely hard worker,” Swarthmore coach Shane Loeffler said earlier this season. 

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Scranton women move up the rankings

The Scranton women’s basketball team, which is 17-0 overall and 10-0 in the Landmark Conference, is ranked second in the country behind only NYU, and the Lady Royals have several players with local ties.

Sophomore Lizzie Halligan (Academy of Notre Dame), sophomore Marisa Francione (Conestoga) and freshman Brooke Olender (Archbishop Carroll) are area players on the Scranton roster. Halligan (1.9 points per game), Francione (3.0 points per game) and Olender (0.9 points per game) are part of a young team with only three seniors.

Scranton gained national attention early in the season with a 69-63 win over Division I Pittsburgh in an exhibition game and has only continued to impress. The Lady Royals have won their games by an average margin of victory of 35.2 points, trailing only top-ranked NYU, which has an average margin of victory of 43.7 points per game.

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Layups

Last week, four of the top five ranked men’s teams lost to unranked teams - No. 1 Trinity (Conn.) lost to Wesleyan (Conn.), No. 2 University of Chicago lost to NYU, No. 4 Mount Union lost to Ohio Northern, and No. 5 Randolph-Macon lost to Virginia Wesleyan. … Olivia Boccella, a Lansdale Catholic graduate who is a sophomore guard for Catholic University, played only 16 minutes in a win over Lycoming on Saturday but scored a career-high 24 points on 8-of-10 shooting from behind the arc. Boccella’s eight three-pointers tied the program record for most made three-pointers in a game. … The Penn State Abington men’s basketball team, under the direction of first-year coach Sean Westerlund, hosted sixth-ranked Mary Washington on Saturday and lost, 87-71. In that game, Tyler Fox, a junior guard from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., scored a season-high 25 points and tied a program record with seven made three-pointers. The Nittany Lions are 3-16 overall and 3-4 in the United East Conference but have been playing their best basketball as of late.