Hawks Hoops Head Down Home Stretch

As the calendar turns to February, the Naugatuck Valley League basketball season enters its home stretch, and with only a few weeks remaining, both the Woodland boys’ and girls’ basketball teams will be scrambling to secure the victories they need to qualify for postseason play.

The boys’ squad equaled its win total from a year ago by splitting its first two games, defeating both Watertown and Wolcott. But since their solid start, the Hawks have dropped eight of nine and are now in jeopardy of missing out on the Class M state tournament for the fourth consecutive year with a 3-10 record.

“After we got those first two wins under our belt, we came out weak in the Ansonia and Kennedy games,” senior forward Nick Boucher said. “We’ve started to play a little better, but we keep coming up short, like the one-point loss to Naugatuck. Then against Seymour, we didn’t have [senior center Jason] Skibek, and they shot lights out and beat us, which was a huge loss.”

In order for the Hawks to reach the eight-win plateau necessary to qualify for the Class M tourney, the Black and Gold will have to win five of its final seven games. After Wednesday’s game at Wolcott, the Hawks face Ansonia, Kennedy, Sacred Heart, and Seymour (on Feb. 20 for Senior Night) at home, all of which won the teams’ first meetings. In addition, the boys travel to Naugatuck in an attempt to avenge the earlier one-point loss before finishing at Wilby.

“We can do it,” Boucher said. “We just really have to come out and play a full game against everyone, something we haven’t always done. …The guys that have been stepping up for us lately, like [sophomore guard] Yahmad Rountree and [junior forward] Bryan Spickle, need to keep working hard. ”

The girls are also seeking to make the state tournament for the sixth time in as many varsity seasons. They too will have to scramble in the final weeks of the campaign to notch the two wins they need to be playing in March.

The Hawks faced several questions heading into the season, the biggest of which was how they would go about replacing All-NVL center Sam LaCroce, but the girls seemed to answer it by working as a team and receiving steady contributions from several players. With this balance between the outside threats of senior Sam Werner and sophomore Lindsay Feducia as well as the inside games of junior Katie Alfiere and sophomore Heather Framski, Woodland jumped out to a 6-3 start.

“We really had nothing to lose at the beginning of the season,” Alfiere said. “Nobody expected anything from us so we played as hard as we could to prove a point.”

But since defeating Sacred Heart on Jan. 9, the Hawks have gone on a tailspin, losing six straight to fall to 6-9 and put both a state tournament berth as well as another NVL tourney appearance at risk. Woodland has gone from being solidly in the league’s top six to falling behind Naugatuck for the final spot in the NVL tournament.

“After starting well, we started playing some better teams, and then we stopped playing as a team like we were,” Alfiere noted. “We need to play like we played at the beginning of the season and work as a team better. We’re hoping to qualify for states this week and think we can win four out of our last five games.”

Those last five games include three opponents that the Black and Gold has already beaten in Seymour, Crosby, and Sacred Heart. The girls also travel to Kennedy and finish with their Senior Night game against the Greyhounds on Feb. 17, potentially for a spot in the NVL tournament.

Note: Both the boys' and girls' teams took a step closer to reaching their respective state tournaments by winning on Wednesday night. The girls easily handled Seymour by nearly 30 while the guys came back from 10 points down with 4 minutes to go to defeat Wolcott by 4. The girls are now 7-9; the boys are 4-10.