Villa forwards looking to flip the script
By: Kate Harman
It wasn’t hard to tell which locker room belonged to the winning team one Saturday afternoon at the University of the Sciences Hoops for Hope Showcase.
It was the one with the music blaring. The one with the singing - and the laughing.
“Yeah, we got so close,” the song went.
“But you had to go and mess it up,” it continued, slightly muffled due to the raucous.
After “So Close” by NOTD and Felix Jaehn, the Villa Maria girls’ basketball team slowed things down with the Pentatonix version of “Hallelujah” before “ Lil Wayne’s “Uproar” took over the speaker as a joke for coach Kathy McCartney.
After the longtime coach acknowledged the track with a smile, the music cut and the laughter dwindled.
“We are capable of such great things,” McCartney said ,to her assembled Hurricanes, after beating Garnet Valley in a big non-league win.
The great that McCartney spoke of on that day was far from Abby Walheim’s mind her first year in a Villa uniform. The same goes for Paige Lauder, although both players managed to earn starting spots their first year in the program.
Now, the respective senior and junior forwards have the Hurricanes at 19-3 and playing for the Catholic Academies championship against rival St. Basil on Wednesday night.
“They are very, very athletic,” McCartney said of the duo that both stand over 6-feet tall. “That is something that makes them indefensible at times.”
It also helps them power the offense.
“I think we just feed really well off each other,” Lauder, a Columbia recruit, said. “We are great at finding each other. We are similar positions so you wouldn’t necessarily think we’d feed off each other the way we do, but we are both very versatile. I can play inside, outside and she can do the same.”
The chemistry between the two is apparent. When was has the ball the other is cutting, trying to find an opening. When one is hot, the other knows to give it to her, and vice versa.
Case in point? That day at Bobby Morgan Arena where the pair combined for 35 of their team’s 58 points, often assisting on one another’s buckets.
“Abby Walheim is one of the best athletes in the state, I think,” McCartney said. “I mean she is just incredibly athletic and she had to take a couple of years to become a basketball player because she is a lacrosse player but let me tell you what, she could play basketball at the next level if she wanted to.
“And Paige’s basketball acumen has increased so much,” coach added. “When you are that big, long, and athletic as a young kid you can do whatever you want, you don’t have to work at it. Now she has to work to get open, see open spaces, roll off the screens and she does it so well. Her basketball acumen has increased every year and that has been the difference.”
Walheim and Lauder are hoping it’ll be enough of a difference to change the “frustrating” pattern of coming up short in big contests.
In fact, the storied Hurricanes haven’t won a Catholic Academies titles since 2012 and their last District 1 championship was in 2013. During Walheim’s tenure with Villa, her squads have twice finished runner up in District 1 and league play, as well as failed to win a state tournament game.
Her basketball teams, that is. Her lacrosse teams have fared better, capturing the league, district, and state titles just last season.
“I may be playing lacrosse in college but I still love basketball - just love the game,” Walheim, a Villanova commit, said. “I’ve been playing since I was little and my family is full of basketball fans. In my four years at Villa we never won first place. For lacrosse, we won league, districts, states.
“But I never had that feeling for basketball,” she added. “That would mean so much.”
In other words, Walheim and Lauder are sick of being so close.
@Ka_Harman
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