With the high school basketball state championships set to begin on Thursday, the Cooperstown girls find themselves as the last local team left standing.
The Hawkeyes will take on Section II champion Stillwater in the Class C Semifinals at Hudson Valley Community College on Thursday at 6 p.m. It’s their first final four appearance since 2016, one year after winning the state championship in 2015.
Having had a few days to celebrate and process their come-from-behind 55-48 victory over Delhi in Saturday’s Regional Final, coach Mike Niles said his team is ready to go for Thursday. In fact, they were ready not long after Saturday’s win, as Niles said many of his players immediately started looking up info on Stillwater on the bus ride home from Tompkins Cortland Community College.
“The kids all have smiles on their faces,” Niles said. “Everybody’s pretty excited.”
This will be Niles’ fourth trip to the State Final Four with the Hawkeyes, so he knows what a great team looks like when he sees one. From the earliest preseason practice sessions, he said he had a sense that this year’s team could be special.
“Sometimes in between seasons I feel like it’s a drag to come into open gyms,” he said. “I know the kids like to do it, but I was having a heck of a time watching them in open gyms. They were making some really, really nice basketball plays.”
But it was a convincing 50-32 win over a strong West Canada Valley team in early January that confirmed his hunch was a good one. From there, the Hawkeyes have racked up a 21-4 record, a Section III Championship and another shot at the state crown.
All year long, Cooperstown has been a team defined by its mix of experience and youth. The Hawkeyes boast a rock-solid leadership group that includes seniors Mia Kaltenbach, Polly Kennedy, Bella Reich and Brenna Seamon as well as junior Katie Crippen.
But some of their biggest contributions have come from eighth-grader Lanie Nelen and seventh-grader Emma Johnson. While that age gap means this collective group hasn’t played as much basketball together as most final four teams, Niles said you wouldn’t be able to tell by watching them on the court.
“It’s been seamless,” he said. “Emma and Lanie each have a good personality and a sense of humour and they have a level of expertise and passion about basketball that would be similar to a senior.”
He credits his more experienced players with being able to adjust to this new dynamic as the season went along.
“They saw the potential in our younger kids too and they refined what their own roles were,” Niles said. “They understood them but also made an allowance and even an expectation that the younger kids would contribute.”
That has especially shown up on the defensive side of the ball: the Hawkeyes have allowed more than 50 points in a game just once during their current eight-game win streak
“Mia and Brenna, there hasn’t been two kids like that here in a long, long time, that can be the face of the defense,” Niles said.
Cooperstown has been able to win all manner of games on their road to Troy. They’ve had to come from behind in the Regional Final against Delhi. They’ve won low-scoring affairs like the 43-34 win in the sectional final over Hamilton. They’ve won shootouts like a 60-58 win over West Canada Valley in the sectional semifinals.
Niles said that ability to adapt and be resilient is emblematic of a mature, championship-caliber team.
“Resiliency is a really important word for young people and an important characteristic, so I think that’s certainly there,” he said. “At the same time, patience. It’s hard to go play your butt off on defense trip after trip after trip while we’re figuring out what we want to do on offense and we’ve been able to do that.”
They’ll have to be at their very best on Thursday against a Stillwater squad that is both a heavyweight and underdog. The Warriors boast a 23-2 record and are the top-ranked team in the state but are also appearing in their first final four in program history not long after winning their first-ever sectional title.
From his initial looks, Niles sees a team that likes to slow the game down and possesses plenty of size at all five positions.
“My impression is that they’re gonna grind on us in the halfcourt like Delhi did, really pressure and bust up your actions,” he said.
Having been to this stage multiple times, Cooperstown’s coach knows he doesn’t need to employ any rah-rah motivational tactics to get his team ready to play the biggest game of their young lives.
“I haven’t got my ‘Win one for the Gipper’ index card yet,” he said. “We’re not here because we got the most likes or the most shares. We beat the teams, we did it in a lot of different ways and everybody’s had a hand in that and they’ve earned the right to be on an island with those three other teams that are still playing.
“We’re just going to try and go through our paces, get everybody on the same page and just be energized to start that game at six on Thursday and let ‘em take our best shot and put ourselves in a position to advance.”