Shayla Felder has spent the past three years torturing opponents with her nifty moves and wide array of offensive tools.
Guard her too closely, and the Cheltenham senior will blow by you for one of her patented drives to the basket. Give Felder room, and she’ll burn you from long range.
On Tuesday night, Cheltenham’s senior guard surpassed the 1,000-point plateau when she buried a three-point basket in the opening quarter of the Lady Panthers’ 58-44 win over Springfield.
“She’s had a great career,” Cheltenham coach Bob Schaefer said. “She could probably be working on 1,500 points except she’s such a team player.
“She takes great pride in feeding other players. She’s very unselfish and really has for the most part been unstoppable.”
Felder is the straw that stirs the drink for this year’s Lady Panther squad, and although only 5-3 – as she is generously listed, Felder has found a way to make height irrelevant in a sport where it is sometimes used as a measuring stick.
“I actually think I’m bigger than what I am when I’m on the court,” she said.
And Felder plays that way.
“She is a very small girl,” Schaefer said. “But you know what – she hasn’t been stopped by many people in her four years.”
When games are on the line, Schaefer wants the ball in Felder’s hands.
With good reason.
Few guards anywhere are better at penetrating and dishing or drawing the foul, and the senior guard – an adept ball handler - is the master at running the Panthers’ patented spread offense to close out games.
“Both last year and this year, we’ve won games when the verdict was still open by basically putting the game in her hands,” Schaefer said. “Teams can’t get to her because she’s so quick and such a good ball handler. They can’t stay with her. They end up fouling her, and when it comes down to crunch time, she’s an excellent free throw shooter.
“We won a number of big games this year and a couple of big playoff games last year by her controlling the ball at the end of the game, and when I say the end of the game, I don’t mean a minute or two. I mean five, six or seven minutes when we just left it in her hands to control the ball and keep it away from the other team.”
A perfect example was last year’s district quarterfinal win over West Chester Henderson when the Lady Panthers lost one player after another to fouls.
“All of our forwards were fouled out, and Shayla just controlled the game,” Schaefer said.
A money player, Felder scored 19 of her game-high 27 points in the second half of that big win – 13 in the pivotal fourth quarter. She also had eight steals.
Central Bucks South coach Beth Mattern has been on the opposing bench when Felder has worked her late-game magic – Felder was the glue in the Lady Panthers’ 51-50 win over the Titans earlier this year.
“Shayla Felder is a phenomenal point guard,” Mattern said after the game. “She is just absolutely fantastic. There’s nothing else to be said about her.
“(Colleges) would be crazy to pass on her. I don’t care how tall she is – I would put her on my team any day. She could help anyone.”
***
Roll back the calendar to March of 2000.
Shayla Felder, then a wide-eyed eight-year-old, was in the stands when the Cheltenham Lady Panthers captured the program’s first ever PIAA Class AAAA state title.
The win came in the most dramatic fashion when – with the Lady Panthers trailing heavily favored Oakland Catholic by one – senior captain Shayla Johnson broke down her defender on a drive to the hole for a basket that turned out to be the game winner.
It was one of many highlight reel plays by Johnson during the course of a magical game.
“Everyone was calling her name – ‘Shayla Johnson. Shayla Johnson,’ and she was doing really good,” Felder – then Shayla Jackson - recalled of a chant that echoed throughout the building. “I was like, ‘That’s me they’re calling.’
“I was so excited, and after that, it was, ‘I want to be like her.’ I was playing soccer at the time, and I wasn’t really interested in playing basketball until I saw her play. She got me into playing basketball. She was amazing.”
Felder, who competed in tennis, swimming, track and soccer, began working on her basketball skills. It wasn’t long before the other sports fell by the wayside.
“My mom got me a basketball, and I would just dribble and keep dribbling,” she said. “I didn’t have a court, so all I would do is dribble.”
Before long, Felder was playing basketball in a community league, and by the time she was 11, she had joined the AAU circuit as a member of the Philadelphia Belles. More recently, she played for Fencor.
As a ninth grader, Felder was pulled up to play jayvee. She saw limited varsity minutes, scoring 33 points.
“Anyone we bring up as a ninth grader, we expect to excel,” Schaefer said.
Felder certainly did not disappoint.
A fixture in the starting lineup since she was a sophomore, she has earned her spot among the program’s best and – thanks to her recent accomplishment – joins a wall of fame that includes some mighty big names, including Shayla Johnson, Laura Harper and former point guard Andrea Jones, Felder’s mentor.
“It’s very exciting,” she said. “I’m very honored to be a Lady Panther and to follow the tradition of everyone up on the wall.”
This season, when Schaefer is looking to up the tempo, he inserts Felder at point.
“That just creates havoc for the other team,” he said.
If Felder has a trademark shot, it is her pull-up off the dribble after penetrating the paint.
“We work at getting every player to be able to do that, but she certainly excels at that because she can easily get by her man,” Schaefer said. “In fact, I keep saying to her that I want her to shoot at least 10 pull-up jump shots inside the lane, which she could do if she wanted to, but she ends up kicking it out to the wing for a shot.
“She’s not our point guard but spends half the game at least being the point guard. She sets up as our two guard, which is a three-point shooter and a kid who can drive and also go out and handle the ball. We’ve had a lot of options with this year’s team. We have three guards (Felder, Tiffany Johnson and Liz Taliaferro) who could start for most teams at point guard, and that says a lot about the ball control they can exert.”
Collegiate basketball is part of Felder’s future, and Kutztown University has the early lead in what figures to be – if it’s not already – a battle for her talents. She is considering education or social work as a major.
For now, Felder is directing all of her focus on her final high school season. The Lady Panthers are 19-0 heading down the home stretch.
“Everyone is willing to work and step up, make plays and play defense,” Felder said.
Felder is hoping for a little happier ending to this year’s season than last year when she was sidelined with an injury in her team’s season-ending loss in the state semifinals.
“It brought me to tears to see how they struggled,” Felder said. “After that game, I felt like it was my fault that they lost. I felt like I let everyone on the team and my coaches down.”
The records will show that the young lady who began playing basketball because – in her own words - she ‘wanted to be a Lady Panther’ has rarely let her team or coaches down during a stellar high school career.
“She’s a great kid,” Schaefer said. “She practices hard, and she can do it all really.”
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