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HEARTBREAKER
Ten years ago, the Irish almost won another state championship
BY CHARLES GROVE
YOUNGSTOWN
A decade has passed since the 2006 Ursuline girls basketball team fell just short in the Division III state championship game.
Vannessa Dickson, the Ursuline girls basketball head coach, was a senior on that team that saw a late lead slip away into a 55-49 loss in Columbus.
In the 2004 state semifinals en route to a state championship against Oak Hill, Ursuline took down Jonathan Alder. Unfortunately for the Irish, the Pioneers got their revenge two years later, coming back from a nine-point halftime deficit to win by six at the final buzzer at Ohio State University’s Value City Arena.
“I remember the final quite vividly,” Dickson said. “During halftime, we knew the game wasn’t over.
“We knew that we could win but we also knew Alder was going to be fueled by us knocking them off two years ago in the semifinals,” Dickson said. “But what we did to them in the first half, they did to us in the second half.
“It’s one of those games you think back and go, ‘I wish I could have that back.’ I think that instead of playing our aggressive style of basketball we kind of let up a little bit because we had a nine-point lead.”
Sean Durkin, the head coach of the Irish in 2006, said he knew his team was very good, especially with three seniors who played extensively as sophomores on the 2004 state championship team. Around the halfway point in the season is when he thought a state title could be a real possibility.
“The seniors who had been part of that 2004 team really picked their game up,” Durkin said. “About midway through the season I knew we had a good chance.”
Things looked to be coming together in the first half of the state final for the Irish. Ursuline held not only a 27-18 lead, but were shooting a staggering 71 percent from three-point land.
But it all came crumbling down in the second half when the Irish shot only 34.6 percent and went 1-of-9 from beyond the arc.
“Tyra Grant hit almost a half court shot at the end of the first quarter and we went up at the half feeling pretty good about ourselves,” Durkin said. “But they just outplayed us in the second half.”
Grant, who won Ohio’s Ms. Basketball that year and went on to play at Penn State, was drafted by the Phoenix Mercury in the 2010 WNBA Draft. She scored 30 points for the Irish in the final but it wasn’t enough as nobody else managed to score more than six.
“There’s always things you can look back on and say, ‘I could’ve done this or I could’ve done that but at the end of the day we made it to the state final, where every team wants to be,” Grant said. “I think that was good in its own right.
“Would you want to win? Absolutely. But Jonathan Alder was a great team. It’s 50/50 with them. They got one and we got one.”
Aside from Grant, Dickson said the 2006 team was much more of a blue-collar type team than the 2004 state champions. The team relied much more on defense and didn’t quite pass the eye-test of a state caliber team.
“At that level you expect about two Division I athletes across the board but for us we were more of a hard working team that worked well together,” Dickson said. “We got along well and a lot of things went our way because of our work ethic.”
Durkin said while his 2006 team obviously had talent, that team’s bread and butter was its defensive intensity.
“We had a lot of kids who really worked hard and we were a great defensive team that really got after people,” Durkin said. “Our staple was how well we played defensively.”
While the 2006 team didn’t turn out to be state champions, Dickson said that team is a great model of what a hard-working team that may not have the star athletes can achieve. And she uses what the 2006 team accomplished as motivation for her current Irish team.
“I tell my team that the 2006 team wasn’t a team you necessarily looked at and said, ‘OK. They deserve to be in Columbus.’ It was purely off work ethic and that’s what I try to tell my kids. I tell them that if you work hard great things will happen.”