Just to be clear, there actually is hardware, not just platitudes.
The Pima Aztecs women’s basketball team collected plenty of it after culminating an impressive regular season on Tuesday. Not that it matters much.
A day after closing out the year with a 16-point win at Scottsdale Community College, and on the same day he was named ACCAC coach of the year, Todd Holthaus said he planned to give his girls the day off. They’d earned it, as evidenced by four players on the all-ACCAC teams, including Division II player of the year Sydni Stallworth.
But there’s this nagging thing in the back of their minds and on the front of their shirts, and that’s last season’s disappointing early exit from the playoffs. Their 55-53 loss to Phoenix College one year ago was immortalized on T-shirts for the players to wear — or is it more a cross to bear? — emblazoned with “12-of-25,” the team’s woeful free-throw shooting tally that day.
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Maybe that’s why the Aztecs asked Holthaus to let them watch film and have some floor time for shooting on Wednesday, even as he attended a conference coaches meeting in Phoenix.
“After last night, I gave them some praise, and it was like, ‘Yeah, coach, whatever, but we want to get going,” Holthaus said. “They know what’s coming up. A lot of that is driven by our sophomores. We were upset last year in the first round. This regular season is great, but it all means nothing if we don’t do what we should do in the playoffs.”
Usually a heartbroken junior college team returns a veteran group the next season, and the coach is lucky to have a few talented freshmen to play a supporting role.
But at some point this season, Stallworth went from talented-but-hesitant freshman point guard to full-blown star, and her teammates treated her in kind.
She responded with an average 15.7 points per game, along with 4.7 rebounds and 3.0 steals, taking home four player-of-the-week honors. In a testament to the team’s strength, the three other Aztecs who won various weekly conference honors this season also took home conference honors: Denesia Smith (second-team all-conference), Taylor Blue (second team) and Shalise Fernander (third team).
“They’re all great athletes — and I’m talking all of them — from 1 to 12, and what makes a good athlete? Well, good athletes love to be competitive,” Holthaus said. “They’re never really satisfied. I don’t think they’ve walked off the floor saying, ‘We’ve played our best game.’”
There’s time for that yet, beginning on March 1 in a rematch with Scottsdale, the No. 4 seed in the divisional playoffs. By now, 30 games into a 23-7 season, Holthaus has enough trust that his players are prepared this time around. He’s basically said all he can say, and on Wednesday he called himself Charlie Brown’s teacher — “Wah, wah, wah; there’s not a lot of words that are going to resonate.”
The words won’t mean much at this point, but he’s hoping those numbers — 55-53, 12-for-25 — do. He had the shirts made over the summer, but he said he plans to wear his at practice all week. That might be a little overkill, which he practically admits.
He’s inspired by what he heard out of Fernander after the team’s win, coming out of the final break, as her teammates joined in a huddle.
“Shalise said, ‘You freshmen have to realize we only have one more shot at this. There is no waiting.’”
