Road Warriors

By Glenn Nelson
HoopGurlz Publisher
Posted Mon, 07/09/2007 - 21:49 To say that the Tennessee Flight took a rough road to an End of the Trail title would be literal as well as figurative.

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STORY & PHOTOS BY GLENN NELSON
OREGON CITY, Ore. - If character is built on bumps in the road, then the Tennessee Flight took the overall championship of the End of the Trail club-team tournament for girls on that quality alone. Based on the first few days' miseries, the erstwhile team of the early summer seemed more on a path to self-destruction than ultimate success.

Friday night, the Flight stumbled badly in an exhibition against a talented team in Exodus NYC known more for its underachievement - as well as point-guard entertainer extraordinaire Samantha Prahalis. The next night, the coaches' van banged into (or was banged into, depending on one's perspective) by a deer on a local interstate, leaving the rental totaled. Sunday night, if not for some extremely late heroics by big-play specialist Candace Wood, the Flight were all but doomed to defeat at the hands of North Tartan, another well-disciplined foil from Minnesota.

To make matters worse, the team's usual coach, Matt Insell, down at AAU Nationals with a younger Flight team, was collecting multiple daily blow-by-blows of the car wreck - or, rather, van wreck - that his team seemed to have become.

Unbeknownst to most, LaSondra Barrett, ranked No. 16 in the 2008 class by HoopGurlz.com, took on the role of mechanic after the Exodus debacle and called for a player's only meeting, during which she appealed to her teammates' sense of pride.

The 6-foot- 1 Barrett, of Jackson, Miss., then backed up her sentiments with a Platinum Division MVP performance capped by the game-winner on a put-back, followed by a pair of title-cinching free throws with 45 seconds left in the Flight's 52-48 squeaker over the defending champion Cal Swish Black on Monday afternoon in the Oregon City High School main gym.

Cal Swish Black's path to the championship game was not as torturous, but was no less impressive. The Swish flourish, year to year, on the Xs-and-Os acumen of Russ Davis, whose day job is women's basketball coach at Vanguard University, plus the kind of disciplined, yet versatile players he tends to attract. This year's marquee player is UCLA-bound Antonye Nyingifa who, at a packed 5-11, could be the best inside scorer, off the dribble, in her class. She is complemented by a corps of crafty guards, an inside-outside wing in Lauren Edwards of Brentwood, Calif., who seems a great fit, in terms of skills and grades, for a school such as Stanford, and Kristen Riley, a BYU commit who took so many charges on Monday they ought to call her Visa.

Riley, in fact, drew two quick offensive fouls from Shakeya Leary, Exodus' talented 6-3 power-wing, sending her to the bench with four personals in the first half of the tournament semifinal, then took a collision from Prahalis early in the second. The accepted charges served notice that the usual Exodus freeway to the basketball was closed for repairs and also helped transform much of the New York-based club into a band of raving drama queens. Toss in the fact that Swish is a confounding matchup for Exodus because of the way it plays defense and knows how to control tempo.

Except, as she has demonstrated quite clearly already this summer, Prahalis may be at her best when she is fuming. In one of her signature runs, which included a four-point play, the Commack, N.Y., guard turned a double-digit, surefire blowout into a two-point game with inside of two minutes remaining. Nyingifa downed a rare long-range jumper from the corner, then Edwards knocked down three free throws to rescue the 54-49 Swish victory.

The other semifinal was a knockout, dragout between two of the country's best frontlines. The Cy-Fair Shock's Nneka Ogwumike, whose following among coaches grew as the tournament progressed, was nearly unstoppable with 14 of her game-high 25 points in the first half. However, the Flight have defensive rottweilers in guards Lauren Avant, the 2010 commit for Tennessee, and Natalie Novosel, plus an offensive microwave in Wood, who had eight points during the final two minutes of the half. Cy-Fair also was turn a blowout into a two-point game, after Ogwumike's layup with nine seconds to play, but Novosel nailed down a 71-67 victory with a pair of foul shots with six seconds to play.

And so it was that two of the hottest recruits of the tournament, Ogwumike and Prahalis, were sidelined before the final.

That left room for some lesser-known players to step up, and the biggest was Jasmine Hassell, a 6-3, 2009 post prospect out of Lebanon, Tenn., who usually flies under the radar on the star-studded Flight. Coach Jim Brown, filling in at the head spot for Insell, answered a first-half slugfest by going to Hassell early in the second for five quick points, including an and-one power manuever, and she and Cal's Allison Burns, led all scorers with 14. Riley fired up her take-charge routine for the Swish late in the game, but it failed to sway one of her victims, Barrett, from snatching victory for the Flight off the offensive glass.

The Flight won the last major club tournament, the Nike Midwest Showdown in Mason, Ohio, after surviving a four overtimes against arch-rival West Coast Elite. So this is a team not unaccustomed to getting things the hard way.

The hard way builds character, after all.

Championship Boxscore
Tennessee Flight (52) - Crystal Riley 3, Whitny Edwards 3, Jasmine Hassell 14, Krista Gross 2, Natalie Novosel 6, Lauren Avant 3, Candace Wood 5, Britny Edwards 2, Alex Zarrell 4, LaSondra Barrett 10.
Cal Swish Black (48) - TJ Goddard 6, Atonye Nyingifa 13, Monica DeAngelis 8, Allison Burns 14, Kristen Riley 7, Amanda Sims.

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Glenn Nelson is the publisher of HoopGurlz.com. He also founded and coached the Dragons and Northwest HoopGurlz select girl's basketball teams. Glenn previously was the editor-in-chief at Scout.com and a longtime, national-award-winning basketball columnist and writer for The Seattle Times. His work also has appeared in several books and national magazines. He is co-author of "Rising Stars: The Ten Best Players in the NBA" (Rosen Publishing, 2002). For more on Glenn's World, click here. He can be reached at glenn@hoopgurlz.com.

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