Team Chemistry
By Mike Biskup
Asst. Women's Basketball Coach
With the beginning of each new basketball season, hopes run high
with anticipation. Days, weeks, months of recruiting visits, phone
calls and emails hoping that you find the missing pieces to bring
your team to the championship level. On paper, teams are hopeful
and even confident that this will be the year.
It wasn’t any different for Coach Bridges and the Central
Maine Community College Women’s Basketball team. Coach
Bridges knew that he had talent returning and new talent entering
this season. Returning was Tiffany Seams, the All-Conference Player
of the year in 2008, Britney Salley, an all star last season in the
Yankee Small College Conference, (YSCC), Kerri Harris, last
year’s starting point guard, forward, Katie Martin, another
returning starter along with Ashley Quimby, a deadly 3-point
shooter. Talented incoming freshman included; Christy McAullife, of
Lisbon, Kayla Ellis of Dover, NH, Danielle Hebert of Madison,
Michelle Holmquist of Peru, Tiera Durgin of Oxford Hills, Carrie
Jamison of Dixfield, Tiffany Lougee of Harmony, and Sara Martin of
Mt. Abram.
With this type of depth on a college basketball team, expectations
soared. A conference championship and a possible trip to the
National Tournament in Pennsylvania, appeared to be in reach and
was a goal that all would work towards.
Coach Bridges, (13th season) realized that he had the makings of a
very special team. However, Coach realized that with the talent so
evenly spread among this season’s roster, as well as the ever
increasing level of play within the division, that team chemistry
would be an important ingredient to the success of this
season’s team. Coach Bridges philosophy this season was that
if you work hard and competed against each other each day in
practice, than you will play. But the question begged, would this
year’s team bond with the kind of team chemistry that
championship teams are made of?
The answer was made clear during a snow storm in early January.
With about a foot of new snow on the ground, and no signs of
letting up, Kerri Harris, (Team Captain and Resident Assistant),
was making her way across campus about 11 p.m. Kerri was just
recently engaged to be married. As she was walking through the
snow, she looked down and saw that her engagement ring was missing.
As Kerri made her way back to the dorms, she came across some of
her teammates. They could see that Kerri was visibly upset, and
they got the rest of the team together to look for the ring. The
phrase “needle in a haystack” didn’t quite seem
to measure up to their task of finding an engagement ring,
somewhere on campus, below a foot of snow.
Christy McAuliffe and Tiff Lougee used their ingenuity to obtain
over a hundred pounds of rock salt, while others grabbed shovels,
hats, mittens and gloves. The girls scoured the campus, working
with as well as competing against each other to find Kerri’s
ring. They stopped looking for the ring at 4 a.m. for one reason
and one reason only. Christy McAuliffe found the ring, buried under
the snow. The engagement ring was not the only thing that was found
that cold January night. A team bond was created that would leave
no doubt that this team not only had the talent and work ethic, but
most importantly, team chemistry that sets this team and this
school apart from all others. The engagement ring proved to be more
than just a bond between Kerri and her fiancé Jason, it
represented a bond amongst teammates.
CM Women’s Basketball team went on to defeat New Hampshire
Technical Institute 75- 44 in the semi-finals, and then than
defeated conference rival Southern Maine Community College by a
score of 59- 49 for the YSCC Championship. The women just returned
from the National Tournament in Pennsylvania where they competed
against the top small college teams in the country. All 13 girls
played, competed and contributed, as they did throughout the entire
season.