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Lady Tigers build on winning tradition
(by Steve Novak - January 29, 2009)
Lady Tigers build on winning tradition
By STEVE NOVAK
The Chagrin Falls girls basketball team added two more victories to its season total last week, defeating Independence and Perry, which now gives the team a 13-2 mark and a 7-0 record in the Chagrin Valley Conference. The Lady Tigers visit West Geauga Saturday night.
Coach Curtis Howell's Lady Tigers are defying the usual progression of a high school team, because the 2007-08 team finished 18-4, but lost four starters to graduation. That is usually a signal for a team to require a rebuilding year before they regain their former strength.
But long before this season began, Howell already had begun to figure out the transition which the team was going to need to stay competitive. He said he would most likely need a lot more scoring from his backcourt players.
"Last year we shot pretty well. This year, we want our strong point to be the opposite," Howell said. "We want our guards to get the ball to the hoop. We want to have slashing guards to try to create more shots."
A look at the team statistics shows that the guards are doing just that. Starting guards Sam Lucci and Megan Mignogna have been the two leading scorers. Lucci is averaging about 17 points per game and Mignogna about 10 points per contest.
Howell said the transition to being a guard-driven offense has proven effective.
"We've done really well," he said. "We set up two different offenses for that. One is for a dribble-drive offense and the other is an offense for working off of screens. We try to play up-tempo, with our quickness to our advantage."
It also helps that one of the team's guards has already had some games where she scored way above her average. In a game early in the season, Lucci scored a career-high 34 points. In the Independence contest, she scored 29 points.
On the other side of the ball, Howell again wants to take advantage of the team's overall speed. The 45-35 victory over Perry was a good example. Howell said that when the Tigers ended the first half, they trailed Perry by two points.
The tactic which Howell chose for the entire second half was to use a full-court press. It paid almost immediate dividends, as Chagrin Falls outscored the Pirates 18-7 in the third quarter. He said the press is something that wouldn't have worked as effectively last season.
"We approached it by turning up the intensity defensively," he said. "We really bothered them with the press, and we got some turnovers out of it."
He said one thing which kept the Perry game within reach in the first half was the scoring of Mignogna. She scored 10 points in the first half and wound up hitting on five three-pointers for the game to finish with 19 points. Lucci led the way with 20 points and Kirsten Stevenson added four points.
On the season, Stevenson is the team's third-leading scorer with eight points per game. She also leads the team in steals with 26. In rebounds, Lucci leads the team with 55, followed by Emily Mills and Sam Butler with 47 rebounds each.
Last year, the Tigers shared the CVC crown with Kenston.
But Howell said the girls aren't the type to look ahead to either conference championships or the postseason play. He said they truly know how to take each contest one at a time.
"It's a really special team," he said. "They're just relaxed. They don't get caught up with (saying) we're good or we're better than you. They just get it. They know how things work, and they're awesome to work with."
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