Fencor 1989s

Chestnut Hill Local by TOM UTESCHER August, 2004 At the local Magarity auto dealerships, sales awards are having to make room on the mantel for the prizes won by the owner’s offspring. Joe Magarity’s daughter Colleen, who’ll start her sophomore year at Germantown Academy next month, recently won her second AAU national basketball championship in three years. The 5'4" Magarity plays guard for the Fencor 14-and-under AAU squad which competed at the Division I 14-and-under national championships in Monroe, LA. On July 22, the local squad survived an overtime semifinal battle with the Tulsa (OK) Swoosh, and in the championship game the same day, Fencor knocked off the home-state favorites, the Kenner (LA) Angels, 71-61. Magarity and her teammates won the 12-and-under title two years ago, and last summer they were the national runners-up in the 13's. The Fort Washington-based ballclub has garnered a lot of attention partly due to the imposing presence of Elena Delle Donne, a Wilmington, DE native who’ll be a freshman at Ursuline Academy. Already taping in at close to 6'4",, she’s an outstanding outside shooter as well as an inside force, and she already began to attract the attention of college scouts several years ago. In past years, Magarity was positioned at point guard, playing the role of playmaker and tenacious defender. This year, her shot has improved to the point where she’s equally at home at shooting guard; in fact, she funneled in a remarkable 61-percent of her three-point attempts at the AAU Nationals. “I didn’t used to be much of a scoring threat,” she admitted, “but I’ve been working on my shot all year, during the GA season and in AAU.” For its first and second-place finishes in 2002 and 2003, the Fencor group was coached by Chestnut Hill resident Keith Webster. This March a new mentor took over, Veronica Algeo. A former standout at Lansdale Catholic High School and Ursinus College, Algeo is the aunt of the new women’s hoops coach at Chestnut Hill College, Jackie deMarteleire. At the AAU tournament, the new coach related, “Colleen was not only hitting a huge percentage on her three-pointers, but she hit them at clutch times when we really needed them. In the semifinal game [against Tulsa] she hit a three in the final seconds of the half to stop a run by the other team, and that sent us into halftime with some momentum. She did the same thing in the first half of the championship game at a time when we were struggling a bit on offense. “In the second half,” Algeo continued, “we were up by two with about three minutes and ten seconds to go, and she hit a huge three to put us up by five.” This year’s Fencor squad featured a relatively compact roster of only nine players. Two athletes from the 2003 team departed but the team added talented small forward Lindsay Kimmel, who traveled down from New York State to practice and play with the squad. “Everyone just connected really well,” Magarity said. “There were so few of us that we got really close; we had team sleepovers and we did a lot together. “We were a quick team,” she went on. “Everyone’s in good shape because we’re all playing other sports and working out. We got up and down the floor really well. We did a lot of transition drills and we ran a lot of transition offense with our new coach.” The team stormed through the Mid-Atlantic region with little difficulty, winning the championship game over the Wildcats. Fencor then suffered a severe blow when 5'10" guard Caroline Doty went down with a fractured fibula. A freshman who’ll begin to attend Germantown Academy this fall, Doty was the team’s second leading scorer and supplements her stature with exceptional leaping ability. As an eighth grader she high jumped 5'6", half-a-foot more than the winning height at the Girls Inter-Ac varsity championships this year. Doty traveled to Louisiana to cheer on the team at Nationals, but only eight athletes were available to play. For the 100-team tournament, the Fencor girls were seeded second behind the team that defeated them in the 2003 final, the Fairfax (VA) Stars. To start off, the clubs were divided into 17 pools of five or six teams each, and their records there would determine their seeding in the official championship draw. Fencor went 4-0 in Pool Q, winning by margins ranging from 17 to 42 points. In the championship bracket, Magarity’s club won by double digits in each of its first three contests, then beat an Orlando, FL entry in the quarterfinals, 60-53. Next up, in the semifinals, was the sixth-seeded Swoosh from Oklahoma. “We were down by two in regulation with six seconds to play,” Magarity recalled. “We set up a play, but it didn’t really work, so we threw the ball in down low to Lindsay, and she made a lay-up. Then we sort of pulled away in overtime; it wasn’t as close.” The 79-75 triumph put Fencor into the finals against the Kenner Angels, who had knocked off defending champ Fairfax, 55-50, in the other semifinal. Kenner, a New Orleans suburb, is located several hundred miles downstate from Monroe, which is in north central Louisiana. In the championship game, which began barely two hours after the semifinal concluded, a strong first-half performance by the Pennsylvania team earned Fencor a seven-point advantage at the intermission. Kenner went ahead early in the second half, employing a press that initially rattled the northerners, according to Magarity. “Once we settled down and adjusted, we broke their press easily,” she related. “We got in front again and we were pulling away at the end.” Algeo was ecstatic, more for the players’ sake than her own. “They worked so hard and they were so deserving of the championship,” she said. “I’ve never had an entire team be so supportive of one another. They were so dedicated. They hit every line on every sprint at every practice. I’m blessed to be able to work with this group of young ladies.” Magarity is currently enjoying some beach time at the Jersey shore prior to heading back to Germantown Academy for pre-season soccer practice later this month. Last year her varsity soccer, basketball and lacrosse teams at GA all won Girls Inter-Ac championships. In fact, Magarity has been coming along so well in lacrosse (she moved into a starting role midway through the 2004 season) that the stick sport may become her primary focus. Algeo, who watched several of Magarity’s lacrosse games this spring, feels her athletic ability and her attitude allows her to move easily from sport to sport. “The bigger the stage, the bigger the moment, the point where there’s the least margin for error, the better she plays. As a coach, it’s awesome to have a player like Colleen on your team.”