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In spurts, the first half of the PSA girls’ basketball season has been good. In spurts.
The Mustangs Prep Black team opened the season with three convincing wins, then dropped four in a row despite holding a lead in each, before closing the first semester with wins over two solid teams.
“We’ve talked about this as a team, that we can be very good, that we have a chance to be very good,” coach Devin Hill said. “We’re inconsistent right now, I think we would all agree to that.
“I’m not talking about you ordinary basketball, game of runs. I’m talking about our energy, about we’re not playing well. And not because of anything the other team is doing, but just because we’re not playing well. But I think we’ve shown enough and understand that if we do certain things better, then we can have a really good second half of the year.”
Sitting at 5-4, the Mustangs could very easily be 8-1. But they’re not, and Hill is nothing if not a realist. He won’t allow his team to make excuses, he just fully expects them to make the adjustments. And winning those last two games, at the highly-visible She Got Game Classic in Washington, D.C., just before the break, could go a long way.
“After the first three games, I thought we felt really good about ourselves,” Hill said, “and I think we got punched in the face a little bit after that, which is OK. We responded, and we responded well.”
The Mustangs, who have proven to be more explosive offensively than Hill anticipated especially when shooting 3-pointers, have been led by sophomore Ines Goryanova, a point guard from London who is already widely regarded as one of the top two players in New England; Molly Moffitt, a do-it-all postgrad from Seattle; and Janeya Grant, another sophomore from Portland, Conn., who can light it up.
Moffitt leads the team with 14.8 points and 6.8 rebounds per game, with Grant right there at 13.3 points per game. But it is Goryanova, averaging 13.5 points and 5.5 assists, who is the key to it all.
“Ines makes everything go,” Hill said. “That’s the best way to say it. You don’t always necessarily notice during the games. You can be like ‘Oh, that was a good play,” but when you go back and watch the game, it’s just ridiculous. The vision she has, the understanding, the IQ.
“As far as making people better, now people understand that the better she does with the way she plays, the better everyone is going to look. I hope that’s resonated by now, and I think it has.”
PSA has played a hellacious schedule already, especially when considering the travel. Two days after playing at Life Center Academy in southern New Jersey, they played at Westtown (Penn.) and Blair Academy (N.J.) on back-to-back nights. There are few, if any, teams in the country that would do that. The Mustangs also traveled six hours to Maryland to participate in the Super Scrimmage and take on some of the better teams in the country, including consensus No. 1 Sidwell Friends.
“I’m not saying no one else plays good teams in New England. That’s not true, I’m not saying that,” Hill said. “The way we do it and the stress that we put on these girls really is a lot. But I do think we’re going to be better for it, that it’s going to pay off in February, and that is the key.”
By Stephen Nalbandian
Sports Information Director
Putnam Science Academy
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