Girls Basketball Needs New Feeder System
By Ken Lipshez | Sports Correspondent at February 24, 2024 | 9:00 am | Print
In order for the girls’ basketball program at New Britain High to regain the lofty stature it enjoyed from the 1996-97 season through the end of the Symone Roberts era in 2009, the foundation needs an overhaul that only selflessness and volunteerism can provide.
The heart of former head coach Beryl Piper’s dominant teams came from a thriving Deanery League supported by local churches and church-connected schools, but the support diminished when the economy slipped.
A once-productive feeder program that churned out a steady flow of all-conference and all-state players like Kenitra Johnson, the three Ryba sisters Lindsay, Casey and Stephanie, Lindsey O’Neil, Missy Czeremcha, Megan Smith, Sharnise Beal and Roberts has trickled to a drip.
While numbers are decent, girls are arriving on the high school’s doorstep without a thorough knowledge of the game. Too much time has to be spent on the game’s most basic principles. Head coach Tasha Manzie and her assistants don’t have the girls for enough hours to put a crash course in fundamentals into the preseason practice regimen that will put them on similar footing with the girls from suburban towns. New Britain failed to qualify for the state tournament this year for the first time since 1989-90.
“We have great numbers. We don’t have a lot of knowledgeable basketball players,” said New Britain head coach Tasha Manzie, the former NBHS player now 27-35 after three seasons. “We don’t have a lot of youth programs.”
Travel programs under the auspices of parks and recreation departments stock the pantry in towns like Berlin, Farmington and Avon. None exists in New Britain. An athletics task force started a program in the middle schools this year that should pay some dividends, but more needs to be done at the youth level.
Among those trying to keep the motor running is Mike Jones. Jones, 53, doesn’t have any youngsters in the system. His son Jordan, now at UConn, played for coach Stan Glowiak’s Hurricanes. His daughter Alexis chose track over basketball and excelled in coach Darwin Shaw’s program. Jones, the NBHS freshman coach and local AAU program administrator, is driven by the desire to give back to the community.
“This is my passion,” said Jones, an NBHS track star who graduated in 1977 and went on to major in business at Norfolk State University in Virginia. “Someone always told me you will find your passion in life. Coaching and working with kids has always been my passion.”
Jones’ mission is how to replace a feeder system that has been altered mainly by economics and partially due to cultural changes.
“St. Francis was the powerhouse for girls basketball,” Jones said. “St. Francis used to feed New Britain High. They brought in girls like (Beal, the Rybas, Roberts, Sarah Sideranko). St. Francis combined with Holy Cross and St. Joe’s and it’s called Pope John Paul. The past two years, Pope John Paul hasn’t had a girls basketball team. Their enrollment is down and they haven’t had the numbers.
“Sacred Heart has a team. St. Paul’s in Kensington has a team but a lot of those girls end up going to Mercy, St. Paul in Bristol or Berlin. Some Sacred Heart girls come to New Britain High but they have not been known to have good basketball teams. Pope John Paul doesn’t have anybody. That’s had a big effect on girls basketball in New Britain. They don’t have a feeder system and that’s why we’re down.”
Jones’ AAU team, the Connecticut Heat, staged weekend clinics that spanned eight weeks in the fall and attracted about 70 girls from third through ninth grade.
“Twenty of those girls were from the New Britain area. A lot of them were young, which means there is a future,” Jones said. “But New Britain hasn’t had anything like that and it’s been a struggle.”
He praised the middle school league and tournament organized by NBHS athletic director Len Corto and the school system, but said it’s not enough.
“At least girls are getting introduced into basketball but in other towns fifth-graders are playing,” he said.
Lacking a basketball education at a young age, New Britain girls fall behind. Change appears to be developing slowly.
“I don’t think there will be that much of a surge [in the high school program] next year, but [maybe] the year after,” Jones said. “We have a good group of seventh-graders who if they stay in New Britain will be good. They came through our AAU program. Hopefully it will steamroll.”
Jones got his coaching start with boys in the NEWBRACC League, sponsored by the New Britain Area Council of Churches. When the need arose at St. Joseph’s, he switched to the girls.
“What I found out about girls is that they appreciate you more,” he said. “They do what you ask them to do.”
In the late 1990s Jones was indoctrinated into the AAU program through the Connecticut Fire. When politics intervened, he got together with a group of parents and started the Connecticut Heat.
“I got fired from the Fire and the Heat rose,” he said.
Among his protégés are former NBHS star Tyler Kimball, New Britain native Bianca Simmons who starred at Mercy, Northwest Catholic’s Uju Nwankwo who went on to play at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Nwankwo’s NWC teammate Jenniqua Bailey not playing at Bryant and Brenna Verre, who played for some of Wethersfield High’s best squads. Most of the girls go on to college whether they continue playing basketball or not.
Jones, a self-employed clothier by profession (Michael’s Finest), generates income for the Heat through a series of fund-raisers. He traces his coaching roots to the late, legendary NBHS track coach Irv Black.
“He was a father figure for me,” said Jones, was cut from the basketball team as a freshman and still regrets he allowed friends to talk him out of trying out the next year.
“But if I hadn’t had gotten cut from basketball I never would have got so close to Mr. Black, so things happen for a reason.”
Like so many coaches have said, the greatest joy comes “when you have kids that come back to you afterwards and say thank you. I have kids that call me on Father’s Day. The girls come up to me and hug me. I have a couple of young men that I coached whose fathers were not in their life. They come to me like I was their father figure. My father was not in my life so I understand what it’s like,” Jones said.
So what’s it going to take to ignite a girls hoop revival?
Jones says that New Britain school administrators, particularly acting Superintendent Ron Jakubowski, have been generous in providing use of facilities. There’s no shortage of impressionable elementary school girls who may well have latent basketball skills. The sport doesn’t require a huge equipment investment.
What’s missing is more people like Jones who have expertise to share, a little extra time and understand the value of giving back.
