Soccer, Basketball
Favorite athlete: Joel Embiid
Favorite team: 76ers or Villanova Wildcats
Favorite memory competing in sports: When we beat Cheltenham in basketball on our Senior Night and I scored a career high of 24 points
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: I was going up for a layup and was moving too fast and fell into the bleachers. I also didn’t make the layup
Music on my mobile device: Rap, country, and hip hop
Future plans: To continue my academic and hopefully basketball career at Moravian College
Words to live by: “Sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together”
One goal before turning 30: To travel more to see different parts of the world. I’ve only left the country once
One thing people don’t know about me: I love the Netflix show The Vampire Diaries
By Ed Morrone
Dave Giordano can’t help but look back and laugh.
When asked about his favorite memories of being Rileigh Serroni’s coach, the Springfield Township head basketball coach spoke of an intensity so fierce that it resulted in multiple technical fouls early in his point guard’s junior season. He sat his point guard down for a chat in hopes of channeling that relentless energy, and soon enough Serroni had it under control.
That, Giordano said, is just who Serroni is. A ferocious competitor and respected leader and captain, Serroni unapologetically wears her love of basketball on her sleeve like a badge of honor.
“She quickly got over it, but in those first half dozen games, I had to sit her down and talk to her about it,” Giordano recalled. “I told her that it was my job to protect her, and that she needed to keep her composure, let it roll off her back, put it behind her and move forward.
“Then, this season, I got (a technical) against Interboro. Without even flinching, Rileigh looked over at me, gave me a thumbs up and asked if I was OK. It was a little coach-player moment that nobody else saw, but it’s something I’ll never forget. That’s just the way she is. She was telling me, ‘It’ll be OK, we’ll get through this.’ She’s the kind of player you wish you’d have five of out there, one who, despite the fact that our team struggled getting wins the last three seasons, was never one to not give 100 percent in order to achieve positive results.”
Serroni, a senior who also was a captain of Springfield’s soccer team, has a reputation as a winner, even if one of the smallest schools in Suburban One won very few games during her tenure. Yes, Springfield was often pitted against much larger schools with deeper wells of talent, but look beyond Serroni’s 1-13 senior soccer season or the consecutive 4-18 basketball campaigns the past two years and you’ll find someone who competes hard and is able to find success and positivity in everything she does.
After talking to Serroni, it becomes crystal clear that she sees the bigger picture and approaches life with a perpetual glass-half-full mentality.
“If someone’s head went down, I saw it as my responsibility to always pick them up,” she said. “I want to be a role model for others. I’d say I use my aggressiveness to succeed on the court and field. It’s kind of what I’m known for. I don’t mind shoving someone or getting shoved if it brings the energy up. During basketball, I’m probably on the ground 75 percent of the time, chasing down loose balls or drawing hard fouls on layups. I always want to fight for the ball, and I have no fear in trying.”
Sure, the losing wore on Serroni sometimes, particularly in private. She is human, after all; but she’d never project that on to her teammates and coaches, because it was her job to lead and a strong leader keeps morale high even when things are at their lowest. There’s nothing Springfield can do about its size or numbers in comparison to most of the other schools in the league, so Serroni simply focuses on what she can control and aims to take positive victories from any situation.
“Records don’t define who people or teams are,” Serroni said. “They are just numbers to me. I’ll admit that it bothered me sometimes, because we deserved more wins than we got. We’re playing teams so much bigger than us. Our record wasn’t great in basketball, but I still went into our Senior Night with great energy and we wound up winning in what was one of the greatest nights of my life.
“Same thing for soccer: it’s about having that positive energy and hyping everyone up. The most important thing is that everyone gets along and stays together, because if there’s tension off the field then things will be worse on it.”
Serroni was Giordano’s primary ball handler and leading scorer this past season at about 11 points per game. Her position was point guard, but she could often be found wherever the ball was on the court.
For Dan Malora’s soccer team, Serroni started out as a defender, but not wanting to keep her in a box, Malora created a distinct position called “pace setter” for Serroni simply because he wanted her to be anywhere the ball was.
If Serroni was in the middle of the action, odds are good results were coming for the Spartans.
“The biggest thing about Rileigh is the kind of worker she is,” Malora said. “She wasn’t our top scorer or assists leader, but she was voted a captain because of her incredible work ethic. It’s part of her character. I could put her anywhere on the field, because if we found something she couldn’t do, she’d be working on it the next day and the day after that until she could. She’s not an idle-time kind of girl, and it’s such an admirable quality.
“And she’s a level-headed motivator. At Springfield, we are a small fish swimming with really big sharks, and Rileigh is what I’d call the Springfield model. Wins and losses don’t phase her, because she’s always out there working. It doesn’t matter how much we lost by, because it never bogged her down. She was always ready to get up and work again, which is so huge for a school district that deals with these lumps often.”
Of course, Serroni sure had her moments, and when they came, she lived inside of them and could have for an eternity. Take the Senior Night basketball game against Cheltenham, the last time Serroni would ever play on her home court in a community that had grown so special and meaningful to her.
The Spartans were down at halftime, and Serroni thinks she only had five points at the break. Then, something happened inside of her, and she played like a young woman possessed those final 16 minutes, tallying 19 second-half points en route to a career high in scoring and delivering Springfield a much-needed victory.
“I just had this energy in me, and my brain was telling me, ‘Don’t stop,’” Serroni said. “A spark just went off in me. We were passing well, we were communicating, patient in executing our plays … all things we had struggled with. In that moment, that night, that spark that went off wouldn’t let us lose.”
As an added bonus, Serroni was greeted after the game by an assistant coach at Moravian College, the school in Bethlehem that she had been accepted to and planned on attending. As it turned out, the coach had come to see Serroni play, and Serroni had no clue until after the game. It was a perfect twist of fate, one that Serroni hopes leads to her walking on to the Moravian team once she gets to school.
“She came up to me after the game, and I was just in total shock because I had no idea,” Serroni said. “I wouldn’t have wanted her to be at a game where we got smoked by PW or Upper Dublin, and it was so nice that we won, I got a career high and the coach was there to see me play.”
Serroni classified herself as an always-prepared student, one who always gets her work done and done on time. She excels in science and history classes and is OK with math; Serroni is still evaluating her options as far as what she wants to major in and what career path to pursue, but said she could see herself ending up anywhere from business to management to event planning.
“I like to take control of things, so definitely something where I can organize everything and do things my way creatively,” she said.
Away from the soccer field and basketball court, Serroni is a member of student council and participates in Interact, a club at Springfield that focuses on service and giving back to the community. She also holds down a job at Shady Run Country Club, and spends a lot of her free time in the gym.
Serroni has also recently caught the travel bug after a family trip to Punta Cana. It was the first time she’s ever left the country, and hopes to do so more in the future. Serroni said she’d love to go to Italy, mainly due to the fact that Springfield has some Italian exchange students at the school who won’t stop talking about how incredible their home country is.
At the end of the day, the experience of being a student-athlete at Springfield enriched, fulfilled and positively changed Serroni’s life. She started out as a jayvee player and worked her way up the ladder of both the soccer and basketball programs ultimately becoming a captain in each. The fact that Serroni’s teams didn’t win many games is irrelevant, especially considering her teammates always enthusiastically followed her into every single battle.
“Being an athlete here has taught me that you can still succeed, even if your record doesn’t show it,” Serroni said. “When you push yourself to do well at Springfield, everybody notices. Getting a ‘great game last night’ from somebody in the hallway, that means so much. People know and recognize you here, and they aren’t afraid to congratulate you. That’s what I’m going to miss the most.”
