Posts Tagged ‘Heidi Schlegel’

The same people who vote on where Youngstown State would finish in the Horizon League this season, also vote for who the best player in the conference is.  Brandi Brown was named the preseason Horizon League Player of The Year, but her team was picked, by the same people, to finish tenth out of ten teams.  Second year coach, Bob Boldon, enters this season optimistic that his team is better for the opening tip this season than they were a year ago.  Down the stretch, the Lady Penguins were hot, and nobody wanted to play them because they came around a corner few thought they could.  The strong finish included three home wins and a buzzer loss in the opening round of the Horizon League Tournament.

This just in – Brandi Brown is really good.  The thing that the Penguins need is consistency from her supporting cast to be successful.  Brown became the first scoring leader in conference history to not be voted onto the league’s first team, thus the Penguins will enter this season with sizeable chips on their shoulders.  Is it a case of as Brown goes, so do the Penguins?

“Yes, that is true”, remarked Boldon. “Last year, Brandi shot the ball 150 to 200 times more than anybody else.  I don’t know if it will be that drastic this year, but she is going to shoot the ball more than anyone else is, Brandi is a really good player.  We need to more consistently provide her help.  It seems that last year when a couple of other players stepped up and had good games, we won.  Brandi is still going to take the last shot, everything will run through her. We still need to improve on scoring when she doesn’t have the ball. She will be a big part of everything until she graduates.”

“We all felt responsible for Brandi not being on the first team last year simply because we underachieved as a team,” Boldon said. “(Being picked to finish 10th) hurt some people’s feelings because they felt like they turned the corner a little bit,” Boldon said. “They thought we should have gotten some more respect from the voters. Whatever fuels us is good for me. There were some people who felt like we weren’t ‘that team’ anymore.”

The Penguins lost Boki Dimitrov to graduation.  Makala Gasparek and Maryum Jenkins will not be playing this year either.  Enter a new group of players, to be custom-molded by Boldon and tidy up a slick spread-motion system. Newcomers Kelsea Fickiesen and Ashley Lawson add some depth at the guard positions.  Junior transfer Devan Matkin further deepens the guard pool.  Second-year guard Melissa Thompson should see more time this season.

Familiar faces to continue the march forward include Kenya Middlebrooks and Liz Hornberger.  Middlebrooks, a senior, and Hornberger, a sophomore, both ranked in the league’s top-10 in three point shooting percentage.   Another sophomore, Monica Touvelle, returns with a wealth of experience, making appearances in all 30 games last season.  Heidi Schlegel could really be a big player for Boldon.  The redshirt freshman played in the first seven games before injuring her foot and missing the remainder of the 2010-11 campaign.

Tiera Jones and Macey Nortey, both seniors, round out Boldon’s active roster.  Jones really came on last year and was very productive when she could stay out of foul trouble.  Nortey is a ball of energy and a vocal presence with a do-what-it-takes attitude.  They should both play a role in the fortunes of this year’s campaign.

“We want to continue to improve on what we did last year”, said Boldon. “The new people we brought in are good shooters and we spent time this offseason working with the players who are returning, and as a result, they have become better shooters as well.  It is a collective movement.”

“There are still a multitude of things that we can teach the players”, said Boldon.  “However, it has been easier this season because the system base was already installed, so we are at a higher starting point.  Our returning players do not know it all, but the turnaround time with them will be quicker this season.  It is more about refreshing them than starting from scratch.”

Boldon’s team opens the season on Friday night at West Virginia.  They then travel to IPFW and Bucknell before returning home for the 2011 home opener against American University on November 21.  This team will not compete for an outright championship this season, however, I would be surprised if they did not win at least 13 games. This year will be more about being competitive and winning games they should win.  With the lack of respect shown by that grand voting panel of Horizon League Wizardry, that means they will finish about 2-28…  I say 14-16.  Hopefully better.

Boldon outlined his short and long-term goals.

“Long term, you start to think about the Horizon League Tournament.  You want to try to get yourself into a favorable position, out of that seven, eight, nine, or ten slot.  We would love to be in a position to host a home game in the tournament.  Short term, we failed to build off of our successes when we had them last year.  We had a little success and got so happy with ourselves that we did not get better.”

With the Holiday Season in the air on the Eve of Thanksgiving, Youngstown State’s Lady Penguins were scraping for reasons to be thankful.  The team had not won a game in its last 34 attempts, or 627 days,  although seem much improved over last season.  Drought Be Gone! The Lady Penguins used 87.5% free throw shooting and some hustle from the role players to get by Bucknell.

Bucknell lost 71-45 the last time these two teams met in 1992.  The margin would not be quite as big but was meaningful in so many ways.  It marked Bob Boldon‘s first victory as new coach.  It broke the drought of 34 losses in a row.  Perhaps the most important thing the win did was give a group of scrappy girls who never quit an inkling of confidence to build on.

In a statistically even first half, the Penguins looked better on offense than they had Saturday against IPFW, yet trailed 30-27. Brandi Brown was doing her best to end the drought with six boards and seven points at intermission.  Newcomer Heidi Schlegel also had seven for the Penguins at the break.  Bucknell was paced by Joyce Novacek‘s nine points and five rebounds.

Monica Touvelle hit a three-pointer at the 15:29 mark of the second half to give YSU a five point lead at 39-34.  Next trip down the floor, Kenya Middlebrooks drilled a three, and at the 13:52 mark, the Penguins were in front by the score of 42-38.  YSU held the lead until the 11:20 mark when Cosima Higham drove the lane to put the Bison up by a point, 45-44.

Liz Hornberger his a three from the corner to give the Penguins back the lead at 49-47 with 10:23 to go.  Hornberger hit her second three of the half to put YSU back on top 52-50.  Middlebrooks extended the lead with her ninth point of the night to extend the lead to 54-50 with 7:06 left in the game, and hold the phones, the chilled champagne might get uncorked in Youngstown.

With 5:36 left, Schlegel kept the Penguins safely ahead with her drive to the hoop that made it 57-53.  YSU was getting some bounces, finally, and upped their lead to 60-53 on a pair of Macey Nortey free throws as the Penguins were 15-18 from the line to this point.

With 1:54 left in the game, Youngstown State enjoyed a 64-55 lead and was just looking to run the clock out.  Free throw shooting was great all night and Schlegel hit a pair to move the lead to 66-55 with just over a minute left in the game.  Nortey stepped up and followed suit with a pair to make it 68-55.  The Penguins went 21-24 from the line to get the win and improve to 1-3 on the season.

After the game, Coach Boldon was complimentary and happy for the team. “They deserved to win tonight because of how hard they worked at practice this week.  I am a believer that hard work at practice should translate over to wins on game day, and they earned this starting two days ago.  I am very happy for the players and they will celebrate this victory, hopefully not too much, because we have practice at nine in the morning.”

Brandi Brown, who finished the game with 23 points and 11 rebounds was happy to get a win.  “It feels amazing.  It’s a humongous reward for how hard we have been working.  When everybody plays their role and listens to Coach Boldon, we can win.“

The Youngstown State University Women’s Basketball Team opened their home schedule on Saturday afternoon.  Working on busting up a 34 game losing streak, the Lady Penguins welcomed IPWF to the Beeghly Center.  The new coaching staff was in place and Bob Boldon knew that the only way to go was up.  Down as many as 14, the Penguins tied the game with four minutes left,  before eventually falling 73-61.

In the first half, the Mastodons took advantage of their size in the low post.  Stephanie Rosado scored 12 points and gathered seven rebounds.  The 6’2″ Junior forward squandered few chances when the ball was in her neck of the woods.  YSU got six points each from Brandi Brown and Maryum Jenkins in the opening half, but as a team, Youngstown State really struggled shooting only 27% from the floor and only hitting two of 13  from three-point range.  Conversely IPFW shot over 40% from the floor to compile a 34-22 lead at the intermission, which was also their biggest lead of the game.

As the second half progressed, the Penguins cut into the twelve-point lead more than once.  With 11:48 left in the game, the Penguins had the lead down to ten as Macey Nortey had a runaway lay up off of a Mastodon turnover. Heidi Schlegel cut it to eight at 51-43 with 8:56 left in the game on a nice cut to the hoop.

At the 6:54 mark, Anne Boese drilled a three to put the Mastodons back up by 10.  The Penguins fought hard to stay in the game, and Brown nailed a three with 5:58 left in the game that suddenly found the Penguins only down three, at 54-51.  Brown hit a drive at the 5:20 mark to cut the lead to just one, and the people made some noise for the home team.  Brown, on a major roll,  kept the hot hand and tied the game at 55 when she followed her own miss for a put back and her 25th point.

IPFW did not roll over or go away.  The Mastodons went on a 7-0 run to take a 64-55 lead with 2:44 left in the game and never looked back.  The Mastodons were paced by Rosado, who tallied 22 points in the victory.  IPFW also got good a game from Jordan Zuppe who had a huge rooting section of her own, and 15 points.

Youngstown State was led  by Brown who finished the game with 29 points, which is a career high, and nine rebounds.  Jenkins and Nortey contributed eight points each.

IPFW, which stands for Indiana and Purdue at Fort Wayne, Indiana, improved to 2-1 on the season.  The Penguins fell to 0-3.  After the game, Coach Boldon addressed the media with the problems plaguing his team. “It’s a new system and I can’t expect us to look perfect.  I can assure you that we will not look perfect against Bucknell on Wednesday.  We didn’t play very good basketball in the first half and we need to get better at every facet of the game.  It’s a work in progress.”

Brown commented on her best-ever game.  “It is a new offense.  Last season I was strictly a post player, whereas this year Coach Boldon trusts everyone on the team to shoot threes. I like the versatility and know that being multi-dimensional is good for the offense.”

I’ll throw the prediction out there first. The YSU Lady Penguins are going to win 10 games this season.  Someone unfamiliar with the programs recent tailspin would scoff at a ten win season.  Those who haven’t seen this program celebrate a victory since 2008 understand that a few wins are steps in the right direction.

On a recent visit to a practice, I wondered how much the returning players remembered from last season.  New Coach, Bob Boldon, blew his whistle for a quick water break.  As the players approached the water dispenser, they went a little out of the way to say hi to me. Big deal?  To me, it was a nice gesture, but it proved that if they can remember a sports blogger from last season that they also retained a few memories to fuel and inspire a hard work ethic going into 2010.

Gone are the two boys who had to practice with the team so there would be enough bodies for a five-on-five drill.  Gone is Cindy Martin. Gone is the attitude that it just can’t be done.

Enter a new coach, a new attitude, a couple of new recruits, and a high-tech three-point shooting machine.  Enter girls who were hurt or had transfer issues.  Enter the bus while there is room, because it will be full in a few years.

Rachel Manuel and Kaitlyn March are the two players who graduated.  The returning women from last year are Macey Nortey, Kenya Middlebrooks, Boki Dimitrov, Makala Gasparek, Maryum Jenkins, and Brandi Brown.  The new faces are Shea Johnson, Kaitlin Rohrs, and Melissa Thompson who missed last year with injuries, and Youngstown native Tieara Jones sat out while meeting academic requirements as a transfer.  There are also three incoming freshmen – Liz Hornberger, Heidi Schlegel, and Boardman High graduate Monica Touvelle.

Coach Boldon is a good choice.  Talking to him is like talking to someone you have known for a couple of years.  After a couple of conversations with him, I applaud Ron Strollo on a solid selection to replace Martin.  Boldon is high on the three-point shot.  Expect every girl on the roster to be able to chuck up a long ball at any time.  There is a lot of motion in Boldon’s Playbook.  This is going to be a fun offense to watch once all of the pieces are in place and the players gain confidence in the system.

Can this team win?  “We have to change our culture. We have to develop and get better. Nobody wants to win more than the team wants to win. Nobody wants to win more than I want to win”, exclaimed Boldon.

Brandi Brown has been named to the Preseason Horizon League Second Team.  Coming off of a freshman season rarely seen at any college, Brown was the only player in the conference to average a double-double.  She was robbed of the Horizon League Newcomer of The Year award last season, and handed the runner-up ribbon in a statistical oversight.  I’m still not sure if all of the voters were from Detroit or if the award is given to a freshman on one of the best teams.  Either way, Brown will vindicate my sentiments with another big year.

Expect a higher-quality and more refined team to win at least ten games this season.

The Youngstown State Women’s Basketball Team opens a fresh season.  For Coach Cindy Martin, it is a chance to show people that this year’s team can overcome a brutal shortage of bodies and succeed.  The Lady Penguins have not had a winning season since the 1999-2000 campaign in which they earned an NCAA Tournament berth.  Since that appearance, YSU has had 20 losses in a year four times including last season’s 3-27 mark.

Only six players on the current roster have any Division I playing experience and only eight players are able to dress.  The numbers game may create some problems for Coach Martin at some point this season.  In the case that a player were to injure herself or foul out, the other players understand they may be playing 45 minutes a contest.

Martin is a hard-working coach and the “things can only get better” or the “woe is me” labels are tags she probably would not welcome.  “I’m excited for a fresh start.  Our execution on offense has been really good and we have come a long way developing our fastbreak.  Elon and High Point are good teams to start with and it would be great to start out 2-0.  They are both good teams and we feel like we will have a chance to be in both of those games.”

Kenya Middlebrooks (left) and Rachael Manuel (right) discussed the expectations and where improvement will be most obvious this season.  Middlebrooks replied, “We push each other very hard every day.  We are a close team that is really communicating well.  There will be improvements defensively and with our rebounding.”

Manuel, one of only two Seniors, commented on the conditioning when a team has to play so many minutes, “We will be playing alot of minutes together, and we are obviously a close group.  We are in really great shape and can handle the minutes.”

Martin is one I would never doubt.  She is a fiery leader with alot of character and it seems to be rubbing off on the players.  If she can manage to get a couple of her players who are injured back, this team has every chance in the world to go .500 this season. 

Coach Martin also announced  Monica Touvelle of Boardman, Jill Herman, and Heidi Schlegel have signed National Letters of Intent to attend YSU.  The trio consists of two guards and a post player.

YSU will host Kent State in the first game of a doubleheader at Beeghly Center on Wednesday with the men’s teams playing the second.  Tipoff is at 5:15 at Beeghly Center.