Girls hoops on win streak
By Justin Feil, The Packet Group
With each week, Ed Fitzpatrick sees more progress from his Northern Burlington County High girls basketball team.
The Greyhounds started the season 1-2 with both losses coming to state powers, but have since rallied with wins in three of their next four games to improve to 4-3.
”They’re starting to learn how to compete all the time,” said Fitzpatrick, who has moved up from freshman to varsity head coach. “It’s been a three-week process.”
Fitzpatrick has been happy with the steps the Greyhounds have taken. They won three straight — stopping Lindenwold, New Egypt and Stuart Country Day School — before falling to Holy Cross last Thursday. The Greyhounds have a lot back from last year’s team, but are figuring out what their new coach wants out of them.
”It’s something the girls have to learn,” Fitzpatrick said. “No matter what the score is, you compete and play hard for all 32 minutes.”
Their hard work is starting to show. In the 52-33 win over Stuart, Rachel Dortch had 16 points and eight rebounds, Jackie Laurenti had 13 points and seven rebounds and Shelby dolan had eight points, eight rebounds and five assists.
”Last year at this time, we weren’t even at .500,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’d been beaten by Pemberton last year. That’s a team I didn’t think we should have been beaten by. Hunterdon Central, when we played them, it was worse last year. We’ve made some progress. We have to continue to build on staying together and don’t get down on each other and listen to what the coaching staff is telling you.”
Fitzpatrck has surrounded himself with familiar faces for assistant coaches. Chris Matthews, a former NBC player who Fitzpatrick coached, is now a varsity assistant coach. Steve Kleimen and Casey Duke also return for the program.
”I’ve been at Northern for a ton of years,” Fitzpatrick said. “They’re great people to work with.”
Fitzpatrick was plenty familiar with the pieces he had to work with coming into this year. He had been the freshman coach last year, but has mixed up the schemes since taking over the varsity.
”Even from last year, we’re using a press,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’re using the press more. Last year, we didn’t press much. We’ve changed from a predominantly man-to-man defense to a 3-2 defense. We’re also running some more set plays.Just about the whole offense is new compared to last year. Every day in practice, we go over all our offensive sets. Any time you change, everybody has to buy in and accept change.”
In this case, there were a lot of players to change. Northern Burlington didn’t suffer the paralyzing graduation losses of some schools. There were no Greyhound seniors last year, and Fitzpatrick is hoping to use that returning experience to his advantage.
”They’re an experienced group, but not an older group,” he said. “We didn’t have any seniors on the team last year. That forced some of the kids to have to play varsity basketball. We didn’t even have 30 kids in the program last year. We had seven kids on the freshman team. We had to share kids from freshman to JV team. This year, our numbers are up a bit. None of the freshmen have to play JV. We built our numbers up.”
The recent stretch of wins also reminds the Greyhounds of their big goals for the year.
”We didn’t want to back into playoffs,” Fitzpatrick said. “We want to earn our way into the playoffs. I think last year were 11-16. We want to be over .500. Last year, we were the lowest seed in our bracket and that earned us the opportunity to play Neptune and that wasn’t a whole lot of fun.”
NBC remembers the end to their state tournament appearance last year, and it’s one of the things that motivates them. They got to see their full roster slow Stuart in their latest win. Dortch, who will continue her career at Pace University, Laurenti and Dolan were the top offensive players. Brianna Coit had five points and six assists and has been steady off the bench in her sophomore year. Courtney Funk, Marissa Rivera, Amirah Terry and Gabby Van Mater all provided points. The Greyhounds are hoping to get back to winning this week after the loss to Holy Cross.
”We have Bordentown on Tuesday, Delran on Thursday and Burlington Township on Saturday,” Fitzpatrick said. “This week should give us an idea just where we’re at as far as the rest of the league, outside of maybe Willingboro and Delran.”Willingboro and Rancocas Valley gave NBC their first two losses of the season, but
Fitzpatrick didn’t want his team to get discouraged by them. He tried to find the silver lining in them.
”There are just small victories in those games, like breaking the press,” Fitzpatrick said. “Also the girls, realistically they get to see the different levels of basketball and see where other schools are and where we’d like to be someday.”
To get there, the Greyhounds need a leader. Fitzpatrick thinks they have a good one in senior guard Gabby Van Mater, one of four seniors along with Dortch, Laurenti and Tyler Jones.
”Gabby is our leader,” he said. “She’s a very mature kids, accepts her role.”Gabby gives you everything she has every minute she’s out there. I think some of the kids are starting to see that and starting to pick up on it. Laurenti is much the same. She just plays very, very hard and plays right to the end.”
They are setting the example for the rest of the season and for future NBC girls basketball teams. The Greyhounds are working on the small improvements that they can handle this season.
”We need to work on defensive rebounding, and we need to take better care of the basketball in the offensive end, make the easy pass not the spectacular one,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’re just working on boxing out. The Holy Cross game, we had a bad first quarter and after that we played them even. If we boxed out better in the first quarter, we probably wouldn’t have won, but it would have been an 8-10 point game instead of 18.”
Ed Fitzpatrick is encouraged by the progress he’s seen through the first month of the season. He’s expecting it to pay off as the Greyhounds get more experience together with the new concepts.
Said Fitzpatrick: “All the kids are really focused on getting better and just trying to do the right things.”