North Xtra: After rough start, Planets are aligned
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Mars Area High School's Teresa Dallatore grabs a loose ball in a game against Hampton.
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With a young team struggling out of the gate and sitting at 0-5 on Dec. 20, outsiders might have told the Mars Area girls' basketball team to start looking forward to next season.
The 15 players on the roster and three coaches were not about to consider this a rebuilding year, however, so instead of looking toward next season , they looked toward next year -- as in 2012.
Despite a 2-8 record, the Planets embarked on their section schedule on Jan. 5 with a 0-0 record in section play. Turning the calendar to 2012 coincided with turning the season around.
Mars won eight of its nine section games to all of a sudden go from rebuilding to fighting for a section title with Hampton.
"We didn't have a great record in December and everyone kept telling us to hang in there and look toward the future," Mars coach Tony Howard said.
"For us, we were talking about January and February as our future. Our future is 2012, not next year or the year after that."
Overall the team is 10-11 but Mars might be the best 10-11 team around these parts. Mars and Hampton (11-9, 8-1) are tied atop Section 1-AAA, both with one section game remaining to be played tonight.
Mars scored its biggest win of the season a week ago when it knocked off Hampton, 48-46, to create the tie atop the standings.
If you ask Howard, he will point to the first meeting against Hampton as the turning point of the season.
His team was 4-8 overall and 2-0 in the section when it lost a close game at Hampton, 38-34, on Jan. 12.
The Planets overcame a halftime deficit to score the first 12 points of the third quarter and built a seven-point lead in the fourth quarter but then their shots stopped falling, Hampton clawed back into the game and eventually won.
"To be honest with you, that was our biggest game of the season," Howard said. "We felt we should have won that game. We had a lot of opportunities but in the fourth quarter, we didn't make some shots that we normally make. We picked up a lot of confidence there. We were disappointed that we didn't get that one, but the girls started to believe."
In December, five games into the season and still winless, Howard was in a precarious position. He had a young team with no returning starters. Overall, the Planets returned only 76 career points and 63 of those belonged to one player, senior Randi Francis, the team's top reserve last season.
Mars played a brutally tough non-section schedule that featured teams such as Blackhawk, Aliquippa, Sto-Rox, Hopewell, North Hills, Pine-Richland and South Park.
The difficulty of the schedule was magnified by the inexperience of the team. Francis at 2.7 points, 3 rebounds and 2 assists per game during the 2010-11 season was the statistical leader among returners in all those categories.
The team was starting a freshman and its first five players off the bench were freshmen and sophomores.
"We were young this year," Howard said. "We liked to play some real good out-of-section teams because we knew our section didn't start until after New Year's. So we thought we could turn our lack of experience into experience by Christmastime."
Francis started alongside junior guards Teresa Dallatore and Alyssa Mathews, senior forward Brinsley Maughan-Evanson and freshman forward Ali Goetz. It was the first time in his five seasons at Mars that Howard did not return a single starter.
"I give the girls a lot of credit," Howard said. "They had a good summer and they kept working. We started off playing a lot of good teams and we played very, very good portions of the game but we just tried to get more consistent, it is hard to play 32 real good minutes of basketball."
Howard is not surprised Goetz has emerged as a starter but he is surprised that she is leading the team in scoring, averaging 13.3 points per game.
"The way she played this summer, we knew she was going to be an important factor," he said.
Goetz also leads the team with eight rebounds per game. Francis is second on the team averaging 11 points per game.
Mars is scheduled to close out its regular season tonight with a section game against Knoch at 7:30. The Planets will honor their two seniors, Evanson and Francis.
"I hope we can play well for our seniors," Howard said.
First Published February 9, 2012 12:00 am
