The Best of Summer

In the first of three parts, HoopGurlz.com chooses the best from June and July 2006, in various categories of girl's basketball.

PHOTOS BY GLENN NELSON

The road through the summer circuit for girl's basketball begins each year in Colorado Springs, Colo. Most years, that means the Youth Development Festival. This year was an anamoly on two counts: a.) trials for the USA Basketball U18 team placed the YDF, and b.) the shooting during the trials was, as aptly and succinctly described by Tara VanDerveer, the Stanford head coach and USA Basketball selection committee member, "horrendous."

That sour note was the launching pad for a national search for evidence of a trend. By the end of July, we all were able to breathe a sigh of relief as VanDerveer's assessment seemed more clarion call than indictment.

Oh, how they answered. Boo Williams' Marah Strickland, the silky jumper shooter from Mount Airy, Md., started blowing up during the Nike Girl's Skills Academy. The End of the Trail brought forth net burners the likes of Melissa Jones from WYCO Pride, Courtney Collishaw and Hannah Donaghe of CenCal Elite, Kayla Standish of Yakima Elite, among others, and Caroline Doty of Fencor emerged as a national star and leader. In Birmingham, Ala., Italee Lucas of West Coast Elite put on one of the great shooting displays of the month. Other shooters, such as Angela Puleo of the Tennessee Flight, Kim Rodgers of Boo Williams, Alicia Manning of the Georgia Metros and Sydney Colson of the Houston Insiders followed suit.

Suwanee, Ga., offered a national stage for recovering area-code bomber Jordan Jones of FBC Georgia, and Nikki Speed of FBC Blue put on the long-distance show of the summer. In Las Vegas, we saw two 6-foot-3 posts from the 2009 class (Joslyn Tinkle and Dannielle Diamant) and a 6-footer with a linebacker build (Danielle Adams) step out and bury threes with regularity. Then a very grand finale in North Augusta, S.C., saw the emergence of Skylar Diggins of The Family and the return of two "old" hands, Angie Bjorklund of the Spokane Stars and Elena DelleDonne of Fencor, whose absence in Colorado Springs perhaps warped the whole picture.

All in all, we'd say it was a very good, pretty accurate summer.

Even by Tara VanDerveer's lofty standards.

The rest of the Best of Summer:

Teams

All along, we thought the Georgia Metros were the best team we'd seen in a while. They featured the country's No. 1 player in Maya Moore, a player in Alicia Manning who every bit looks like a top 10 player in the 2008 and one of the most highly sought-after post prospects in 6-6 Kelley Cain. But the list certainly did not stop there, as the Metros were massively deep, a team that could beat you defensively, in transition, in the halfcourt, inside and outside. They appeared to be an underachieving bunch for half of the summer, but that only was wily coach Kathy Richey-Walton pacing the team for the biggest prizes. By the end of the summer, the Metro had claimed the U.S. Junior Nationals, then arguably the crown jewel of July, Nike Nationals.

Teams

1. Georgia Metros
2. FBC Blue
3. Tennessee Flight
4. All-Ohio
5. Cal Swish

The shame of club-team politics and sneaker company marketing is that the question that this section raises - who is the nation's best team - never will be truly settled. As resolute in our opinion as we are about the Metros being No. 1, we're almost as resolute about the fact that we may be wrong. The two best defensive teams in the country this year were the Metros and FBC Blue, which is based in Southern California. They also were the two deepest and most overall talented. FBC won the two biggest titles on the adidas circuit, the Deep South Classic and Tournament of Champions, and could easily repeat both titles as it is a team built around the wildly talented '08 prospects, Nikki Speed and Jasmine Dixon.

An amalgam of Cetera DeGraffenreid's star power, Angela Puleo's long-range shooting and the brainpower of a large coaching staff headed by Matt Insell, the Tennessee Flight were knocking on the door all summer, including taking the Metros to overtime in the Nike Nationals. All-Ohio featured the best post prospect of '07 (Jantel Lavender) and the best of '08 (Ayana Dunning), plus a player in Liz Repella who can dominate games with her energy. By other criteria, the Cal Swish could make a persuasive argument for heading this category, as it claimed End of the Trail, the River City Classic and its own tournament, led by sometimes underestimatable Jeanette Pohlen and superb coach Russ Davis.

Worst of Summer

Well, yeah, we tricked you. July wasn't all sugar and spice. We witnessed some bad stuff, too, and bring it up because maybe something will be done about it. We're also not going to do a breakout list because, well, this is an ignominious (girls, if you're reading, that's an SAT word if I ever saw one) category. Finally, we're bringing this up now because we'll be darned if we end a "Best of" piece on such a downer.

1. The Coach Who Yelled at His Team for 30 Minutes After a Great Loss: Maybe one day we'll start to, but we're not going to name names here. Suffice to say that it was an atrocious display at the main gym of a prestigious tournament with a great many college head coaches looking on. What was this guy thinking? His team had nearly knocked off a team that clearly was better. Not only that, they went into overtime. We have told this story to women's college coaches, citing it as an example of negative male influence in the girl's game. Their response was to point out that women can get after it, too. To which we say, not like this. And it's not a women's first instinct to raise her voice, like it is with most males. The subset of this category is male coaches who yell from the bench. The worst part of it all is, yelling just doesn't play with girls. Nor does it play when they grow up and become women. Can we get an "amen" here?

2. Teams That Didn’t Show Up (or Showed Up Late or Left Early) for Games at Basketball on the Bayou: This is the height off selfishness. You entered a tournament, games were scheduled. Contrary to popular notions, not showing up or showing up late or forfeiting games doesn't hurt the tournament director (though it does inconvenience her or him). The victims are the other teams scheduled to play that game. The players, coaches and family likely traveled great distances to play the game. Not to mention the college coaches (and Chris and I!) who showed up to watch. We're not talking unforeseeable circumstances here, either (eg., delayed travel, emergencies, etc.). We're talking plain indifference. The structure cannot survive with people like this. And, in case you don't think this eventually catches up with you, we have a team and coach in our own backyard whom we discovered is notorious for doing this and most people now will not even work with him.

3. Parents Scheming on Coaches: Neither Chris nor I coach club basketball anymore. This is reason No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 (reason No. 5 is to avoid conflicts, or perceived conflicts, with our coverage or rankings). Are we mistaken, or does just about every parent in America hates their club-team coach? We're exaggerating, of course. But we witnessed several teams which either fell apart, or soon will, because of parental sniping. In almost every case, our perspective is that the problem with said teams is not the coaching, but the disharmony wrought by disgruntled parents who almost never seem to grasp the big picture the way the coaches must.

4. Coaches Who Didn’t Turn in Rosters ("Every Coach in America Knows My Players"): Guess what, lazy butt, they don't! What are you doing this for, if not to expose your kids? Not having rosters, or rosters with incomplete information (accurate jersey numbers (hello!), heights, high schools, contact information) really defeats that purpose.

Jantel Lavender's summer started in mid-June
with USA Basketball trials

5. Too Many Demands of Our Girls: Last year, some elite girls simply skipped major events. This year, several missed major events they wanted to attend because of injuries. Angie Bjorklund of Spokane, Wash., may have pushed herself too hard in preparing for the USA Basketball trials. Who knows, Jacki Gemelos and Dymond Simon may have suffered injuries because of the previous year's demands. We need to rethink the year-round basketball schedule, particularly the July evaluation period, where too many tournaments demand too many games to be played.

6. Lazy or Ego-Maniacal Officials: OK, we know if we turned this list over to our readers, it probably would be inverted, with this category finishing No. 1. While the general public seems to despise lawyers and politicians, the short list among basketball parents includes referees and coaches. Sometimes with good reason. My pet peeves are officials who do not run the court, do not switch positions on fouls, do not step up to the scorer's table to signal infractions and, worst of all, think the game is all about them. We've too often seen the worst officials being assigned to girl's games because the boy's side is considered the creme. So, while the girls get more athletic, bigger and faster, the lazy and older officials who cannot or will not keep up are posing a danger. It's only a matter of time before the revolt.

One personal note: At an auxiliary gym at the Main Event in Las Vegas, I took up my usual spot shooting photos along the baseline (several feet behind, mind you) when one official actually stopped play and said to me, "you are in the game." Huh, I replied, not understanding one iota. He continued to make the statement and when I pressed him for an explanation, he claimed that I was sitting on a part of the court that was "in play." Meanwhile, parents in the stands, who likely thought I was another parent taking pictures of my kid, starting yelling names at me. It was quite humiliating. I got up and left the gym. On the way out, I explained that I was shooting in the same spot I'd shot from at gyms across the country. To which the official replied, "Not in my gym you don't."

Oh.

So I called the tournament director, Hal Paster, who operates several big-time events for boys as well, to give him a head's up. Things happened quickly from there, and I got a call from the assigning official, Steve Oak, who said mine was not the first complaint lodged against this official and that he had been dismissed.

That one's for all of you who don't believe tournament directors listen, or that there's nothing to be done about poor officiating.

I say that and point out this, too: I felt Nike Nationals was the best officiated tournament I'd seen this summer, yet I also heard rampant complaints about how poorly officiated it was. C'mon people, it's never as bad as your rose-colored glasses make it out to be.

All-Summer Team

Back to our regularly scheduled, positive message ...

The two best games we've seen during the past calendar year, considering the drama, level of play and stakes, were the 2005 Nike Tournament of Champions title game in Chandler, Ariz., and the Nike Nationals in North Augusta, S.C. The common denominator, besides the title sponsor, was Maya Moore's luminescent talent and unshakeable will to win. Moore was deterred by a bad call in Chandler, but not so in North Augusta. The No. 1 player in the Class of 2007, Moore also was No. 1 during the summer of 2007, a sign of greatness, considering she'd already committed to Connecticut. She did it all - defended, shot, rebounded, passed. Mostly, she sent a message - if your superstar is on the floor hunting for loose balls, your team is going to enjoy success.

All-Summer

Maya Moore, Georgia Metros, 2007
Cetera DeGraffenreid, Flight, 2007
Jasmine Dixon, FBC Blue, 2008
Brooklyn Pope, DFW Elite, 2008
April Sykes, Essence, 2008

With the exception of No. 1, we're not ranking players in this category. If we were, we'd probably have April Sykes No. 2, but it would have to be with a bullet, particularly when the discussion begins about the Class of 2008. Few players have a body and game as ready for the next level. Sykes doesn't wow anyone with her speed, but she does keep getting around defenders. Not only that, she can score in every way imaginable and make obvious and not-so-obvious deliveries to teammates. The knock would be on her defense but, when informed of such, she knuckled down on it. If Sykes can further her progress in that area, she will be difficult to ignore.

Two other players on this list, Jasmine Dixon and Brooklyn Pope, are eye-popping athletes. Dixon can run, jump and penetrate with the best. Some say she can't shoot well enough to be considered a really elite prospect, but then she trotted out a mid-range game at the end of summer. Pope can perform a sickening array of basketball tasks and skills, and will do them on a grand stage. She'll also like be dunking in games soon. That's all well and good, but it will be game over if she can do everything, even on a slightly lesser level, on a more consistent basis and with improved court sense.

Sharing the Maya Moore, won't-be-denied winners category is Cetera DeGraffenreid, who doesn't have great height, but has physical strength and strength of will and had the Tennessee Flight in the thick of every tournament. She actually appears as if she delights in playing on-ball defense against the game's best point guards, which is the toughest defense of all to play. She also can be unstoppable attacking the rim, makes the right plays for teammates and, although not a fantastically fundamental shooter, would be a kid I'd give the ball with tremendous stakes on the line, without even a second thought.

Monique Oliver of West Coast Elite	Liberty Belles coach Jill Cook
All-Ohio coach Jay-Bee Bethea	Jasmine Dixon of FBC Blue

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Chris Hansen is the National Director of Scouting for Women's Basketball at HoopGurlz.com and Scout.com. Chris leads the panel that evaluates and ranks girl's basketball prospects nationally for HoopGurlz and Scout.com. Chris has been involved in the women’s basketball community since 1998 as a coach, trainer, evaluator and reporter. He can be reached at [e-mail].