Girls basketball: Newman adjusts to new coach, younger lineup

A new coach and a fresh start are the themes for the Newman girls basketball team in 2021-22.

Veteran coach Kevin Malley takes over the Comets program, bringing more than 30 years of coaching experience at various levels to the table. He’s mostly worked with individual athletes both in high school and college as a player development coach, but has also coached boys and girls basketball at the high-school and grade-school levels.

Born on the South Side of Chicago, Malley was in the U.S. Armed Forces before working in the corporate sector. He now lives in Freeport, and retired about 10 years ago; he has since spent even more time working with athletes in skill development, which he says has heavily influenced his coaching philosophy.

“I love both sides of the coaching, both team coaching and individual coaching,” he said. “Spending so much time in the skill development role, it’s molded my philosophy to where even though we have team practices, it is so challenging to be able to do go through drills that would impart the skills to the students. In a team practice, I can impart them team skills: how we run the offense, defenses, press, press breaks. But the fine points of shooting, ball handling, passing and what you occupy on the court is something you also work on individually with the kids.”

Malley said he spent about seven years studying the field of expertise, looking at how you go from novice to expert in a particular field. Bringing that knowledge with him, he sees a lot of potential in the Comets.

“We’re closer to the novice than we are to the expert with the 14 we have on the roster, but the girls have great attitudes, and some of the upperclassmen do bring some skill-sets to the game,” Malley said. “We’ve got four or five players that are really good, and we’ve got a fresh crop of freshman; nine out of 12 are either a freshman or a sophomore, but the ones that are just freshmen really came in surprising me with more skills than I would’ve expected freshmen to have.”

Malley plans to have all the freshmen and sophomores play full JV games, then bring a few up each game to fill out the varsity bench.

While all that youth might mean a little more time for the Comets to gel, the players are looking to pick things up quickly, and believe the season-opening Geneseo Tournament next week will be a good measuring stick.

“I think it might take us a couple of games to get going. We’re in a tough tournament next week, and I think that’ll kind of just show us how hard we need to start working,” junior guard Madison Duhon said. “We already work hard at practice, and these girls are all underclassmen, and they kind of get it already, the sense that since we’re all younger, we have to play up to our opponents’ level, because we’re going to be playing against juniors and seniors, mostly.”

Numbers are also not on the Comets’ side, at least early on, as the volleyball players are in the state tournament this weekend and haven’t turned to basketball yet. But the Comets believe that once the team reaches full strength and everybody gets on the same page, there’s the potential for success.

“Practices are definitely different from last year, with new coaching, and also because we only have eight girls at practice. Yesterday we had to run our offense against chairs and dummies, so it’s definitely different,” Duhon said. “But I think we’re going to get there, and hopefully it will all click when the girls come back from volleyball.”

Jess Johns, Duhon and Helen Papoccia all played significant roles last season, and Amiya Rodriguez also saw some action with the varsity. Lily Terbush joins fellow juniors Johns and Duhon, while Piper Terbush and Abby Peterson join fellow sophomores Papoccia and Rodriguez. Freshman Lucy Oetting rounds out the varsity roster.

Papoccia said there’s been a lot more focus on individual fundamentals this season, and believes defense will also play a big role in the team’s success.

“We’ve been focusing a lot more on technique this year, like footwork and shooting; we’ve done a lot of shooting drills. We went over our plays, and this year it’s slower so the girls understand it better, and hopefully that’ll help us during the games,” she said. “We’ve been working on our defense, and I think it will improve throughout the year. We’ll just have to keep moving our feet and use our quickness.”

Athletcism is certainly a strong point for Newman, and Duhon says the new offense revolves more around that aspect of the players’ game. Papoccia likes the growth she’s already seen from the team, even in the two weeks of preseason practice.

Malley likes the foundation he has to build from, and says the key will be the players’ positive attitude and work ethic as they learn a new system.

“We’ve just got to work hard with the conference that we’re in to put some Ws in the column, but that’s going to require a lot of hard work from the girls to get there. But I think they will; I think they’re going to have a much better season than the one that they had last year. They all have great attitudes and they want to learn, so I’m going to do my best to impart those skills to them so that they can compete a little bit better,” he said. “Last year, we averaged 28 points a game and we gave up 51 points a game, so the spread was pretty large, and we’re going to try to reduce that this year.

“I hope that by running some different offenses that are a little bit more complicated – hopefully we’ll have time to get them through that – and much more aggressive defense, I hope to see us improve as we move forward through the season, and change how we finished last year.”