Long season for NCCC women

by Eric Keppeler
Lewiston Porter Sentinel, February 17, 2007

The Niagara County Community College women’s basketball team hasn’t had the season that head coach Bob McKeown had hoped for.

In each of his first two years at the helm of the program, the Trailblazers had put together a respectable number of wins and then maneuvered themselves into the Region III playoffs.

That streak of postseason appearances is going to grind to a halt this year.

“It’s been a long season,” McKeown said. “We’ve only won two games all year long. We’ve been in most of the games, but we’ve struggled in the division. This will be the first time that I’m not going to make the playoffs. Erie beat us twice, which essentially knocks us out of the playoffs. We lost to them last week in overtime at their place, and that pretty much sealed it for us as far as the regionals are concerned.”

McKeown suspected at the start of the 2006-07 campaign that he might be in for a rough year. He had one starter coming back in former Kenmore East standout Erin Whitehead, but that was about it.

So the rest of his squad was made up of college freshmen who were trying to adjust from the high school game. And it didn’t help that most of the other teams in the region were loaded with veterans.

“A lot of the teams we’ve played against this year are full of experienced players,” said freshman guard and Lew-Port graduate Julie Quarantillo. “Next year, they’ll all be graduated, but most of our team will be back. We’re going to lose one starter, and we’re focusing on that because next year we’ll be the team with the experience.”

Quarantillo says that the biggest adjustment for herself and her fellow freshmen has been the speed of the college game, as well as the increased skill level across the board among the other teams.

The Trailblazers can run with the best of them and do a credible job of denying the other teams, but their inexperience has been most obvious on offense.

“Our biggest problem has been putting the ball in the basket,” Quarantillo said. “We have a hard time scoring. Our defense has actually been very good. We can keep teams from scoring, but our offense doesn’t seem to get going until too late in the game. We have a hard time getting started.”

The defense has kept the Trailblazers in most of their games this season, and McKeown hopes that his team will benefit from the experience.

They’re taking their lumps this season, but they hope to be wiser for it next year.

“We lost a few recruits early on, for whatever reasons, and that hurt us,” McKeown said. “We’ve been trying to catch up ever since. We’ve lost five games by five points or less, mostly because we couldn’t hit a shot at the free throw line. But I have to give the girls a lot of credit because they’ve been hustling through it all – they haven’t stopped trying.”