Rookies showing promise

Women’s basketball looks to earn a spot among the nation’s best

The five young women joining the team for the 2008-09 season represent a special group for head coach Courtney Banghart. A former player and assistant coach at Dartmouth, Banghart filled the Princeton head coaching position late in 2007 after the departure of former head coach Richard Barron. Banghart joined the Princeton program too late to have any effect on the recruitment process for the 2007-08 season but showed promise during her first year with the team.

Banghart, however, did actively recruit each of the five players who will join the squad for the 2008-09 season and who together represent a top-60 national recruiting class. With the loss of senior forward Meagan Cowher and senior forward Ali Prichard after this season, Banghart looked in particular to fill the post position. The loss of Cowher, who is the program’s second-leading career scorer, comes as a particular blow to the team. Beyond simply recruiting post players, however, Banghart wanted to recruit the best players that she could across all positions, in particular looking to add size to the squad.

“I’ve been in the Ivy League now for nine years, so I knew what was going to be a good Ivy League player,” Banghart said. “We basically went after kids that we thought had the academic component and used the Princeton branding name, used the energy of our ‘new-ness.’ ”

The five new players could constitute a whole team in and of themselves, with each of the five recruits potentially filling the five positions on the court. In addition to their diverse playing abilities, they also bring one of the most important ingredents in basketball — height. Four of the five players measure six feet or taller.

The recruits — Devona Allgood, from near Charlotte, N.C.; Beth Binkley, from near Nashville, Tenn.; Lauren Edwards, from Los Angeles, Calif.; Angela Groves from Cleveland, Ohio; and Laura Johnson from Lower Gwynedd, Pa. — hail from a variety of geographic locations. As Banghart stressed, recruitment for women’s collegiate basketball has evolved into a highly nationalized process, giving Princeton the opportunity to attract great high school talent from a large pool.

“[The freshmen] will all see time. They will all see the floor in their first year, which will be great,” Banghart said.

In addition to the talent these new additions will bring to the squad, Banghart also stressed the rejuvenated attitude from which she believes the squad will profit next season thanks to the efforts of current team members.

“The current kids we have, they just smashed the conditioning test in the spring,” Banghart said. “They have just totally reinvested to the goal, invested in our program, and they’re going to be the exact right leaders for the young kids immediately.”

For all the players — rookie and returning — and the coaches, one goal is shared: an Ivy League title and a berth in the NCAA tournament, a feat that Princeton women’s basketball has never achieved.

“Princeton women have never gone to the NCAA tournament, and we talked a lot about how to those five kids, we want you guys to be part of something that helps us get there,” Banghart said.

For women’s field hockey, which had an undefeated league record and finished its regular season with nine consecutive wins in 2007, the seven recruits will infuse a deep team with an even deeper reservoir of experience and talent.

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Two of the recruits — Katie Reinprecht from North Wales, Pa., and Kathleen Sharkey from Kingston, Pa. — bring an unusually high caliber of experience for high school players. Reinprecht currently plays on the United States U21 National Team, as the lone high school member of the squad, while Sharkey also has spent considerable time playing on a national stage and during her senior season, scored the second-most goals of any high school player nationally.

Five of the recruits hail from Pennsylvania: Reinprecht and Sharkey along with Erin Jennings of Emmaus, Rachel Neufeld of Doylestown and Alyssa Pyros of Shavertown. Allison Behringer of Severna Park, Md., and May-Ying Nei-Medalia of Princeton, N.J., round out this year’s very regionalized class of recruits, though this regionalized recruitment was not a specific goal of head coach Kristen Holmes-Winn.

“Most of all, we just try to recruit good hockey players, and we feel for the most part pretty confident that we can make them into whatever type of athlete we need,” Holmes-Winn said.

The seven recruits — who will fill the places of the 10 seniors graduating this year — play a wide range of positions, much as their graduating counterparts did.

“We do anticipate a lot of substituting next year because we will have a lot of depth, and we don’t want to waste any of the talent we have,” Holmes-Winn said. “We will be playing, hopefully, at a real high tempo.” With a strong class, the team seeks to have another impressive season this fall and aim for another opportunity to make an NCAA tournament appearance.