Springdale girls remain in hunt for postseason berth

By: William Whalen
Thursday, February 10, 2022 | 8:01 AM

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The Springdale girls basketball team knows this feeling all too well. It’s the uneasy feeling knowing its playoff season already has begun weeks before the WPIAL postseason bracket has been released.

With just three section games remaining, the Dynamos have little room for error if they want to punch their ticket to the WPIAL Class 2A bracket.

“You have to treat this Winchester Thurston game like its a playoff game,” Springdale coach Jerry Clark said. “We’ve got to kind of steal one from Apollo-Ridge and beat Ellis. We have to win two out of the next four at the minimum.”

Springdale (4-11, 2-4) is in the same position as last season when the Dynamos qualified for the WPIAL playoffs for the first time since the 2012-13 season. The only difference: This season, Ellis School was added to Section 4-2A to bring even more competition to an already tough section.

“We know what we need to do and we know what we need to work on,” said senior captain Bri Thompson, a Geneva softball recruit. “It’s just putting everything together and working as a team to get everything done.”

Springdale entered the week fifth in the section standings behind Greensburg Central Catholic (13-4, 7-0), Apollo-Ridge (13-3, 4-2), Winchester Thurston (7-6, 3-2) and Ellis (5-10, 3-4).

“The very first thing that we got to do, we got to stop beating ourselves,” Clark said. “We go through ebbs and flows, and there are points where our passing is off target.

“We’ll make two or three plays in a row like that, and that’s when the game gets blown wide open.”

After coming out of the gate hot with a 2-1 record, it’s been a bumpy road for the Dynamos. Springdale was riding a five-game losing streak heading into the new year before snapping it in a 39-13 win over section rival Jeannette. Both of the Dynamos section wins came against the Jayhawks.

“We started off OK,” Clark said. “We were feeling pretty good about things. I don’t want to blame it on covid, but it took a bite out of my roster. We had trust in these kids, who are very good kids, but they had to step up into roles a little bit quicker and that’s what kind of happened there.

“I went from having top-nine (players) to all of the sudden I didn’t know where I was going to go after my top five (players).”

Clark has his full complement of players back to finish the final week of the regular season. While the result wasn’t what Clark and his Dynamos would have liked, Clark points to the second game against section leader Greensburg Central Catholic as where things started to come together. Although the Dynamos lost 58-27, Clark’s team battled.

“It was tight in the first quarter,” Clark said. “I believe it was competitive to the end of the second, and it seemed like we were giving them something to think about. It wasn’t like it used to be with them.”

For the Dynamos to pull out the necessary wins to make the postseason, Clark will need guard Grace Gent to continue to play at a high level. Gent, the Dynamos’ leading scorer, put up a season-high 31 points in the Dynamos’ win over Jeannette. She averages 10.3 points.

Getting Thompson back is crucial, too. She has become a difference maker at both ends of the floor.

“Getting Bri Thompson back has been good for us, too, as far as digging out those dirty rebounds and just her hustle has been big,” Clark said. “She’s been healthy, and she’s been good.”

Clark said his team’s ability clinch a playoff spot will be predicated on senior captain Emily Wilhelm’s performance. With Katie Stec and Gent getting attention from opposing defenses, Wilhelm needs to become the third shooter and a threat defenses need to respect.

“What I need out of (Wilhelm) is that we need her to shoot more,” Clark said. “While Katie and Gracie carry the scoring load for us, (she has) to be a threat.”

Clark sang the praises of junior Jocelyn Walters Vrable and will rely heavily on Addison Schussman, Abigail Williams and Ashley Spencer.

“I just feel like we need to jell more as a team,” Thompson said. “We have the materials we need, we just need to put everything together. Basketball and every other sport you play is a mental game.”

William Whalen is a freelance writer.

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