By Laura Amato
Go ahead and doubt the McClancy girls’ basketball team—the Lady Crusaders don’t care. In fact, this year’s squad is using that doubt as a motivation as it heads into a season full of transition.
A year after winning the program’s first-ever Division II diocesan title and CHSAA Class B state crown, McClancy is moving up to the “A” division and the squad is doing it after graduating seven seniors from last year’s team.
It won’t be easy, but the Lady Crusaders aren’t listening to any of the detractors.
“People definitely do think that we’ll struggle and we know that,” senior forward Kaitlyn Stenz said. “I think with the moving up in the division, people are doubting us and that really fuels our fire even more. We want to go out there and win.”
Although the Lady Crusaders will face off against some new competition in league play, there hasn’t been much change in McClancy’s preseason prep or, more importantly, its preseason schedule. The squad is still set to scrimmage against some of the top teams in the city—and the state—over the next few weeks and that early-season challenge is enough to give the Lady Crusaders a boost of confidence.
“The approach is the same. We’re going to play as hard as we can and nothing really changes for us honestly,” McClancy coach Dewey Hopkins said. “Our non-league schedule, every team we played last year was an A-team. So the girls know what the challenge is.”
The key for the Lady Crusaders rests in the ability of both Stenz and fellow senior standout Kimberly Soriano. The two are already stepping up as leaders in practice, but Hopkins needs them to step up on the stat sheet as well.
“We’re going to really rely on [them] as far as leadership, but we really expect them to produce as well,” he said. “We lost about 35 points per game with the five seniors that graduated last year, so somebody’s going to have to step up and become a scorer.”
McClancy may be focused on keeping things as normal as possible this preseason—determined not to give too much credence to the challenges of switching divisions—but that hardly means practice has been easy.
“It’s been a lot of conditioning for about a month now,” Stenz said. “Our practices are just really getting to know each other on and off the court.”
The Lady Crusaders know what other squads expect, but as far as McClancy is concerned, this isn’t a transition year. This is, quite simply, a title defense and the squad is ready to battle for another season, determined to repeat—even in a different division.
