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CHICAGO STYLE
Canfield graduate Bryanne Halfhill is senior leader on unbeaten UC basketball team
CHICAGO
After four-consectutive conference titles with first-team all league honors every season, Bryanne Halfhill graduated from Canfield High with the intentions of being a “normal” student at Penn State.
She took classes at University Park in the summer of 2008 and was excited for a real college experience and her first Nittany Lion football game.
“Then, I started freaking out,” she said.
Originally, Halfhill thought she could go without basketball, the sport she’s been playing since right around the time she could walk. But she needed basketball and, perhaps, basketball needed her.
Right before that fall semester, she called up University of Chicago head coach Aaron Roussell to see if he still had a spot for her on the team that highly recruited her out of Canfield.
Luckily for both the Maroons and Halfhill — he did.
“I knew that I was missing out on a great opportunity of just being part of a team again,” Halfhill said. “This is my best life decision, 150 percent the right decision.”
In her first season with Chicago, she was the team’s leading scorer and was named a freshman All-American. Sophomore year, she tallied a team-high 47 steals. Last year, she broke the school record for 3-pointers with 62.
And this, he senior year, she has led the Maroons to an undefeated regular season record and a No. 2 ranking in the NCAA’s Division III. They’ve defeated opponents by an average of 19.7 points per game.
“This is the first time in the many years that I’ve played where my team has done this well and has gone undefeated,” Halfhill said.
She won’t take all the credit, though. There are four other seniors who have worked and grown together and she says that chemistry has been four years in the making.
“We’re a real close-knit team and a pretty intense group,” Halfhill said. “We all hold each other accountable. We have an aggressiveness and competitiveness with each other. That’s been the key part to success this season.”
Plenty of family support has fueled this masterpiece of a season — and career, too.
Her parents, Brian and Renee, make the nearly seven-hour trip to Chicago almost every weekend. They’ll also stop in the Toledo area where their other daughter, Jillian, is a sophomore guard on the Bowling Green women’s basketball team.
“They’ll come see my play on a Friday, then drive to over on Saturday to see her, then come back and see me if I have a game on Sunday,” Bryanne said. “It’s been a bit crazy for them. They love coming to Chicago and I love their support.”
She shares the same mentality of everyone basketball-related person at this time of year. It’s the playoffs and everybody has a clean slate. The Maroons bowed out of the postseason tournament in the elite eight, last year, and open up the playoffs against Monmouth tonight.
“We’re all starting at the same point and our undefeated record isn’t going to mean all that much,” Halfill said. “We know what it feels like to lose and we don’t want that feeling again.”