Over the course of the weekends of March 7 to 9 and 14 to 16, youth recreational basketball teams from all over the Connecticut and Rhode Island area converged on Waterford High School for eastern Connecticut’s own version of March Madness; the 29th annual Neil Hoelck Memorial Tournament. Among the many teams to compete in this year’s event was a new squad, the Ledyard girls’ fifth- and sixth-grade travel team. In their debut in a tournament that attracts AAU teams, few suspected Ledyard would advance past the first round. Yet as the tournament wound down to Championship Sunday, it was indeed this young upstart Ledyard squad who stood against a seasoned Waterford team in the finals.
Coached by Dave Brannan and John Duplice, the travel team’s story began in 2007 when Brannan first decided to try and put together a team to allow the girls to compete against other towns and get a feel for the competition they would face in the Neil Hoelck tournament. Starting off with 10 girls, all 10 years old, Brannan didn’t join a specific league, but rather arranged games with other area travel teams. Inexperienced and a bit outmatched, the team lost all of its games before it was bounced from the tournament in the first round by a dynamic Salem team. Brannan joked that his team could barely score 10 points.
“When we first started out, our girls didn’t know what a zone was, they didn’t know how to play against the press, because that’s just not something that we do in Parks and Rec,” Brannan explained.
But with their passion for the game and an admiration for their talented peers from other towns, the girls returned in 2008 ready to change their fortune.
With the help of Duplice, Brannan held tryouts and all of the returning girls as well as a few new fifth-graders made the team. With one year of experience, Brannan chose to combine the fifth- and sixth-grade division of the Nutmeg Travel League hosted in Colchester, where his girls would be facing teams from Colchester, Portland, East Haddam, Mansfield, Hebron, Columbia, Marlborough, Preston, and Salem. In addition, he added two more games for experience’s sake against Waterford and Griswold.
After going winless the year before, the girls were prepared to play their first game of a new season—a home game against Mansfield.
“They gave us a very good introduction into what the travel league is all about,” Brannan said, chuckling. “It was our home game, so Mansfield came down to our middle school and they beat us really bad—it was by 30 points or something. So going through that experience and then thinking about the year before, we were thinking, ‘Geez, this is going to be another rough year. How do we keep these girls pumped up?’ But these girls were not discouraged or anything. They came out the following week and we won. So we won one game and then we won another game, and so on.”
The girls not only began winning, but they began winning against teams that had beaten them badly the previous year, even pulling to within two points of defeating Mansfield at the end of the season.
“After that first game where they beat us by 30 or 40 points, the last game against Mansfield, we had improved so much that heading into the fourth quarter we were in the lead, and only ended up losing by two,” Brannan said. “So the improvement was huge.”
Lydia DelGrasso, mother of Olivia DelGrasso who played both seasons with Brannan, couldn’t agree more.
“I saw a tremendous improvement from last year,” DelGrasso said. “Last year they were pretty unorganized, they were running here and there, they just didn’t have any sort of cohesion and they didn’t even work as a team.
Then this year they had plays down and they actually looked like they knew what they were doing out there. I couldn’t believe how far he brought them as a team—it’s amazing.”
While the team was making leaps and bounds, Brannan knew he’d have to make one more change. For tournament play, each team is only allowed 10 players. In addition, while the coaches kept the rotation going, having 12 players on the team meant more girls were sitting on the bench than playing. With this in mind, Brannan recruited three girls from the Ledyard Parks and Recreation basketball league and split his team into two squads, Ledyard Blue, with eight players and Ledyard White with seven. The teams were split evenly in terms of age and talent, with appropriate personnel for each position. With that final adjustment, the team rolled on to finish the season 12 and 8, a stark improvement from the year before. Only the tournament was left.
“Our ultimate goal from the beginning was the tournament, to do well,” Brannan explained. “We weren’t trying to build up a good record or anything like that, we were just trying to get exposure, trying to get experience by working as a team, and then eventually go into the tournament and hopefully compete well.”
And compete they did. After two successive wins over East Lyme and Cranston, the Ledyard White team advanced to the finals to take on Waterford.
“The last game, the championship game, there was such a good turnout,” Brannan said. “There were a lot of people in the stands…the community here in Ledyard were really proud of these girls…we had a lot of Ledyard community members come and support the Ledyard team. The kids had all these signs up with the players’ names, and we were really excited about being there.”
The game was closely contested, and Ledyard came out of the gates fast, running up an early six-point lead and playing strong defense, not allowing Waterford to get to the basket. Heading into the fourth quarter,
Ledyard still had the lead, yet Waterford hit a series of timely three-pointers and ultimately won the contest by four points.
“In the second half, well, Waterford plays a different game than we do,” Brannan said. “Where we try and pick up the pace of the game, they are more of a perimeter shooting team. I mean, at this level, it was pretty incredible. These girls were hitting three-pointers and they’re only in the fifth and sixth grade. So that’s what they brought in the second half, and that’s how they got us.”
Brannan admitted it would have been nice to grab the victory, but he felt the entire season and the way the girls pulled together as a team was the ultimate victory, a sentiment shared not only by the players but the parents as well.
“I think they really got used to each other’s playing styles and the individuals on the floor,” Peter Fustini, father of point guard Arianna Fustini, explained. “They came out more experienced, just playing together as a team. I’d like to see them stick together for years to come…They just keep getting fundamentally more sound and they keep figuring out what Dave [Brannan] and John [Duplice] are doing and figuring out how the chemistry on the court is going and it’s fun. It makes me proud as a father.”
“I think it was really fun this year. I mean, last year we had fun too, but we lost a lot of games so this year it was nice to win some, especially to make it to the championship in the tournament, because usually we’re knocked out in the first round,” Arianna Fustini said. “Last year really taught us how to handle losing. And playing together helped because we’re going to be together, this group of girls, probably all the way until high school, so it’s good that we get to work together.”
While he and Duplice helped to lay the groundwork for a solid team, keeping this group of girls together is exactly what Brannan hopes will happen.
“What’s so great and so exciting about this group is that when you watch these girls, they play so well, and it’s really the whole team,” Brannan said. “It’s not just one girl here or there. It’s a group of girls that will continue progressing, and once they get to middle school and high school and start playing with some of the older girls, Ledyard’s going to have a pretty good program.”