IUSABB/IGBRR State Tournament Review: 5 Storylines
This past weekend was the annual Indiana U.S. Amateur Basketball State Tournament. While it is a boys’ and girls’ event held at numerous locations, the high school girls’ divisional games were all played at Triton Central High School (plus the…
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Continue ReadingThis past weekend was the annual Indiana U.S. Amateur Basketball State Tournament. While it is a boys’ and girls’ event held at numerous locations, the high school girls’ divisional games were all played at Triton Central High School (plus the middle school and elementary school on the same campus). It was also co-hosted by IGBRR. I was able to attend Friday evening and all day Saturday, and throughout the duration of the event, I noticed several things I wanted to point out below. I will follow this article over the next 24-48 hours with more content on individual prospects, but these five items really stood out to me now that the weekend has concluded.
1. The Sky Digg Flight UAA 2020 team is really good together.
Every so often you find a group of players who just mix well together, and they figure out a way to win games. This group is intelligent, they all understand their roles well, and they look like they enjoy playing together. They aren’t necessarily the most talented or the most athletic group around, but they are very much a team, and they’ve had impressive showings when I’ve been able to see them at both the Shamrock Classic and this past weekend. Keegan Sullivan and Ella Collier stand out if you want to discuss projections and recruiting. Sullivan is a strong, physical, powerful wing forward who handles and passes it like a guard. Her ability to get to the basket and finish, draw fouls, or create for others has been tough for opponents to stop. Collier is more of a perimeter shooter with a beautiful stroke, but even she looks stronger and is trying to attack the basket a lot more this year. Tia Tolbert, Claire Knies, and Payton Cronen are additional wings who bring something unique to this group. Tolbert is incredibly tough and physical, she can really take a hit, and she is good attacking the basket. Knies has some similarities to Sullivan stylistically, as she has a powerful frame and can create off the bounce. Cronen is a Kentucky kid (Assumption H.S.) who supplies them with another wing shooter. When you pair her with Collier in the lineup and get any type of penetration from a third perimeter player, it’s like playing H-O-R-S-E for those wing shooters. Maybe the toughest pound-for-pound player on the team is point guard Kelsie James. She is definitely short and undersized, but she’s strong, quick/fast, and she can really play. She has a good handle, she can find teammates on-time/on-target, and she can knock down open shots. She has had games where she’s been the pulse of this team. Kashlin Biffle is another player who is probably a little undersized for how she plays, but she is highly productive. She is strong, physical, and aggressive, she’s great in the mid-post, but she’s also skilled with the ball. Then you add in two girls over 6-feet in Lucy Robertson and Christina Himelick, and you have capable bigs who can patrol the paint defensively and make easy baskets around the rim offensively. For whatever reason, this group has turned into the perfect concoction of players to win games consistently this Spring & Summer.
2. Pioneer looks to be a contender in Class 1A for the foreseeable future.
The Lady Panthers had a streak of seven consecutive losing seasons entering the 2018-2019 season, most of which were made up of five wins or fewer. They finished the 2017-2018 season with just a 6-15 record, and that was with a heavy dose of veterans in the lineup. So what gives? This season Pioneer rattled off a 16-7 record, knocked off a historically tough North White program in the Sectional Championship, and made it to the Regional with a Freshman and two Sophomores as part of their core, plus the program’s best prospect hasn’t even stepped foot on the high school stage just yet. 2022 forward Hailey Cripe (9.0p, 6.0r, 1.5s), 2021 wing Olivia Brooke (7.5p, 7.6r, 2.3a, 1.9s), and 2021 front-liner Madison Blickenstaff (4.6p, 5.2r, 1.2s) were the Lady Panthers’ third through fifth leading scorers and their top three rebounders this season. In 2019-2020, you can add to the mix dynamic 2023 point guard Ashlynn Brooke, who is a legitimate Division-I prospect, and the future is extremely bright for Pioneer girls’ basketball. Ashlynn Brooke is such a skilled, poised, and savvy ballplayer, that she should be able to help replace any scoring that graduated, plus she’ll open up opportunities for her teammates to score a lot easier, because she’ll likely draw chasers and double-teams throughout her career. And while I haven’t seen Cripe or Blickenstaff yet, I did see Olivia Brooke this weekend, and she’s a really nice, wiry strong athlete who should thrive by getting 1-on-1 matchups and attacking the basket. At the Class 1A level, if you have a Division-I prospect with a solid supporting cast, which the Lady Panthers definitely have, you can make waves in the state tournament.
3. “Little sis” means business.
Oftentimes in the local tournaments with few or no out-of-state teams involved, you see two teams from the same program match up against each other. Yesterday in the Semi-Finals of the top girls’ bracket, Indiana Elite Thunder (all 2020 prospects) and Indiana Elite Prime (a mixture of 2021 & 2022 prospects) matched up, with the Prime team pulling out a 45-43 victory and advancing to the Championship Game. While the Thunder team was missing a couple of players, the Prime team was also missing recent Butler University commit Alex Richard and another sizeable frontline player in Jade Nutley. Still, though, Prime got steady play throughout their roster all weekend, and I was really impressed with how Audra Emmerson stepped up at times and hit big shots. She is slight of frame, but she’s quick/fast, feisty, and skilled with the ball in her hands. Front-liner Lilly Stoddard continues to show improvement, and she finished a couple of post feeds with immediate, decisive moves for scores. And, of course, I also really like what Madelyn Bischoff and Jessica Carrothers bring to this team. Bischoff is long, fluid, smooth, and skilled, while Carrothers is a strong, aggressive, relentless attacker. But what I think I like most about them is that the two bring a quiet toughness to the team and never shy away from anyone or anything.
4. Linton-Stockton will be a really tough “out” in Class 2A the next couple of years.
The Miners, like Pioneer (above), went through their own seven-year drought of winning seasons. Then entered the Class of 2021. As Freshmen last year, that group helped Linton-Stockton to a 20-4 record before falling to a tough North Knox team in the Sectional Championship. This season as Sophomores, they improved their schedule a bit, finished 22-4, and were ranked much of the year in Class 2A, but they once again fell in the Sectional Championship, this time to South Knox. For whatever reason, my gut tells me in 2019-2020 they’ll figure it out and advance deep into the tournament. As for the aforementioned Class of 2021, I have spoken time and time again about wing Vanessa Shafford, as she’s one of my favorite players to watch, because she’s as tough as they come, she’s skilled with the ball in her hands, and she can score it at all levels and doesn’t try to do anything outside of her capabilities. But, if the Lady Miners are to become a consistent Top-5 team in Class 2A, then it will likely be because of the drastic improvements made by two other 2021s…Aubrey Burgess and Haley Rose. When you see Burgess with Linton-Stockton, she definitely shows off her athleticism, speed, and quickness, but she almost looks more like a wing shooter/scorer because Shafford handles the ball quite a bit for them. However, this Summer Burgess has solidified herself as one of the better point guard prospects in the 2021 class, because that’s the role she has been playing for her Indiana Showcase team, and she has been outstanding doing so. She is feisty, tough, but also a good decision-maker. Rose, on the other hand, was a wait-and-see prospect because of her slender frame. This year she looks stronger, still somewhat slender, but much more aggressive, more confident, and more fluid and skilled. She is extremely long, somewhat bouncy, and she is much more mobile than I remember, plus she’s putting it on the floor and attacking the basket from the mid-post and perimeter a lot more often. This triple threat in 2021 is capable of carrying Linton-Stockton a long way, but will they be enough?
5. More strong 2023 point guard play this weekend.
I spent time last week in an article I wrote highlighting several really nice point guard prospects in the Class of 2023. Over this past weekend I was able to see Karsyn Norman and Ashlynn Brooke once again, and they were their typical stellar selves. But this gave me an opportunity to watch Ella Hobson again in an extended time period, and it was my first opportunity to get eyes on Briley Munchel. Hobson is about 5-4, smallish, but very long, quick/fast, and she really shot the ball well from the perimeter. If I’m not mistaken, I believe I saw her knock down three or four 3-pointers in about a 4-minute span. She definitely has some tools skillfully, she’s a nice athlete, and if she continues to grow and sees anything close to 5-7, she could very well be another Ella Thompson (Class of 2019) type of player for Center Grove. Munchel was someone I heard about from a credible source, so I wanted to make sure and see her before we get to June. She is smallish too at about 5-3, but she too is extremely long for her size, very quick and shifty, and she just seems to have a natural feel for the game. She was more of a facilitator in the game I saw, but her shooting mechanics were solid when she stepped to the line. She comes into a Rushville situation where there are some really good young guards in place, so their backcourt depth is going to be incredible for the next few years.