Shooting toward bigger goal

The YSU senior basketball player is looking foward to medical school.
By JOE SCALZO
VINDICATOR SPORTS STAFF
YOUNGSTOWN -- You want to know Ashlee Russo? OK, let's start a few years back. She's a freshman at Boardman High School. The Spartans are playing Ursuline. She's playing varsity. Game's on the line. Russo's at the free throw line with a chance to win.
And she missed.
"After the game, I went up to her in the locker room and said, 'You know what? You'll never miss another one because you're such a competitor,' " said Boardman coach Ron Moschella. "And every game after that, when the game was on the line, she never missed."
She got so good, in fact, that it got to be a running joke. Boardman could be up by two with six minutes left and Moschella would look at his daughter, assistant coach Christine Terlesky, and say, "Game's over."
"We called it Ashlee time," he said. "We'd just put the ball in the freezer. They'd foul her, she'd make the free throws.
"She loves the pressure-cooker situations. She loves the spotlight."
Deflects attention
Well, sort of. She loves the spotlight situations, but doesn't love the spotlight. You want to know Ashlee Russo? You have to know about her need to deflect attention. Consider: She's a senior at Youngstown State. She just found out she got accepted to Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine, one of the best medical schools in the state. And when she shows up at basketball practice, she doesn't even tell her coach.
"I actually heard it from one of her teammates," said YSU coach Tisha Hill. "She comes up and says, 'Ashlee just got into med school.' So I blew the whistle and said, 'Holy cow, what's going on?' We stopped practice and applauded her.
"That's typical Russo, though. She doesn't want to draw any attention."
Attributes
You want to know Ashlee Russo? Ask her coaches about her. Certain words come up over and over again. Driven. Competitive. Tough. Friendly. Leader. Perfectionist.
Russo graduated from Boardman with a 4.0 grade point average and was one of eight valedictorians. She got her first B her junior year in biochemistry.
"Stupid class," Russo said. "Wait! Don't put that in."
Too late. It's in because it tells you something about her: It still bugs her. And when she got it, her father, Tim, did something unusual.
"He always told me he was going to throw a party when I got a B," Russo said. "So he ended up taking me out to dinner."
The funny thing is, she might not have got the B if she didn't have to spend so much time with the basketball team. But she loves basketball. If she didn't, she would have quit a long time ago.
Let's go back to her freshman year of high school. The Spartans were at a summer camp at Kent State. They play their first game at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning. And they win. But that's not good enough for Moschella. He drags them outside -- where it's hailing, by the way -- and spends the next half-hour screaming at them about their effort.
"He's insane," Russo said.
She loves that about him. He made her better. Moschella figured out pretty early on that Russo had an insane competitive streak. So he exploited it.
"I would play little games with her, like going up to her before a game and saying, 'I think that girl that's going against you is a little better than you, so don't worry about it,' " Moschella said. "Or I'd say, 'You're not a very good defensive player, so don't worry about it if you struggle against her.'
"After that, I'd feel sorry for the other girl. She'd just take over. She figured out what I was doing by her junior or senior year, but she still got angry. She'd try to prove things to me."
Some players might turn from that style of coaching. Russo embraced it. She carried Boardman to the regional final as a junior, then gutted out her senior season with a high ankle sprain that left her a step slow. All the while, she was reaching out to underclassmen such as Amber Bland and Brittany Durkin, helping them get better.
Injuries
You want to know Ashlee Russo? Then you have to know about her injuries. In the first game of her senior season at Boardman, she was only supposed to play three minutes. She played the final 28, helping the Spartans rally from 15 down to beat Hubbard.
"My mom was a little mad at [Moschella] for that," Russo said, laughing.
She kept playing that year, so the injuries lingered. She redshirted her first season at YSU but her ankles never fully healed. And other injuries cropped up. Right now, it's her back. She had to get five cortisone shots just to play this season.
"I know she's hurt, but it's never because she's letting me be aware of it," said Hill. "She never complains. That just goes to show you how much heart she has. She finishes the things she starts."
And you know what? It's been the best season of her college career. Russo, a 5-foot-7 guard, is averaging career-highs in points (10.3), rebounds (3.4), assists (2.4) and minutes (29.2). She could have taken a medical redshirt this year and played another season. But she had bigger plans.
Those plans started four years ago. After a one-semester stint as an engineering major her freshman year, Russo started taking biology classes. She loved them.
"They were super intense," she said.
So she switched to pre-med.
"It just seemed like such an intense profession," said Russo, who isn't sure which field she will enter. "I would get extremely bored with a 9-to-5 desk job. I love the challenge. I love helping people."
Intelligence
The decision came at a cost. You want to know Ashlee Russo? You have to know about her discipline. To get a 3.93 grade point average in college, she had to cut back on her social life to study. Friday nights. Saturday nights. Didn't matter. She even moved to an off campus apartment this year to cut down on distractions.
By the time she was a senior, she had spent countless hours studying for the MCATs, preparing for med school interviews and getting ready for the next step of her life. Problem was, if the next step was NEOUCOM, she was going to have to beat some long odds. Although the school accepts 115 students each year, about 70 of those seats are given to students who were accepted into the program out of high school. Since Russo was applying for direct entry out of college, she was battling about 1,100 students for the remaining 35 slots.
"The odds aren't very good, you know?" she said. "Only 100 people even get interviews. I guess I figured, if I could get an interview, I had a good chance."
She was right.
"She's very, very likable," Moschella said. "A lot of straight-A students are geeks. She isn't."
You want to know Ashlee Russo? Now you do. And if you're anything like her coaches, you're very, very happy about it.
"She's just been a pleasure to coach," said Hill.
"With a kid like that, there isn't any negative stuff to tell," added Moschella. "She pushed me. She made me a better coach.
"She's what we strive for as a player in our program. But, more importantly, she's what we strive for as a person."
scalzo@vindy.com