By HUNTER O. LYLE
BRADFORD, PA – Success is a coveted, yet elusive thing. Winning, especially in high school sports with the coming and goings of student athletes, can be hard to replicate from one year to the next. However, having returned or restocked their rosters, multiple teams in the area are ready for the challenge of running it back.
In the first year of the Jason Blatchley coaching era, the Bradford girl’s basketball team saw a massive improvement. Following three years that yielded just a combined seven wins, the Lady Owls came away with 10 during the 2024-2025 campaign. Their turnaround progression and growth also earned them the program’s first District 9 Class 4A playoff berth in five years.
“It was great,” said Blatchely, whose team reached the D9 semifinals. “I think we have a great group of girls that have worked exceptionally hard this summer and it followed into the fall and it’s following into the first week of the season. I’m very excited. We just continue to get better day by day.”
The weight of Bradford’s improvement largely fell on the shoulders of Haley Keane. After a breakout freshman year where she averaged 12 points and 10 rebounds, Keane fully took the reins as the Lady Owls’ No. 1 scoring option, defensive anchor and glass cleaner, averaging another double-double season at 14.7 points a game – ranking eighth in D9 – and 10.5 rebounds. Tallying 2.1 blocks per game as well, she earned herself the District 9 Defensive Player of the Year Award.
Alongside Keane last season was the Lady Owls’ battle-tested seniors Mallory Craig, Mackenzie Taylor and Alyssa Johnson, all four-year players who provided the foundational support and facilitating. While they will be without them this season, Bradford welcomes back three other returning letterwinners: Miranda Davis, Shiviah Long, Alexis Kicior.
Having another year of experience under the team’s belt, most of which are juniors or younger, along with participating in a summer league for the first time in four years, the Lady Owls are in their best starting position yet.
“I believe that we’ll grow as the year goes. We’re trying to find ourselves but these girls give it their all every single practice,” said Blatchley. “We’ll take what we did last year and continue to build on it. I think the future looks bright.”
While the Lady Owls are excitedly reinforcing their team around their star, Port Allegany is patching the holes left by their freshly departed one.
Over the past several years, Ella Moses had done it all for the Gators. While being a supporting pillar for Port during her underclassmen years to averaging 15.4 points, 9.2 rebounds, 3.8 assists and 4.2 steals per game during her senior season, all of which were team highs, Moses blossomed into a two-time North Tier League Most Valuable Player. Her dominant efforts lifted the Gators to an 17-5 regular season record, also leading the team to their first D9 finals appearance in nine years.
However, with Moses graduating this past spring, the Gators are back at the drawing board looking to hem the seams.
“My philosophy all along, for a small school like us, I always want to get one or two girls per class that can step up and help us. We’ve been lucky that way in my entire tenure that every year we seem to have a couple of our girls that we can plug in and replace our seniors that graduate. This year’s no different,” said Port Allegany head coach Jamie Evens. “We’ll start three seniors but we’ll also start a junior and either a freshman or sophomore, we’re still figuring that fifth spot out. Either way, that freshman or sophomore will be playing a lot of heavy minutes.”
Three of the Gators who will be taking on key roles both on the court and in the locker room are Brynn Evens, Jenna Renner and Maddy Errick. All going into their senior season, the trio of captains have experience finding ways to contribute. Evens, a returning captain from last year, averaged 9.4 points, six rebounds and 2.4 blocks a game last year, Renner averaged 6.1 points, 4.3 rebounds and 1.4 steals and Errick averaged 4.3 points, 2.5 rebounds and about a steal per game. Along with their individual strides this year, the Gators as a whole will be focusing on tightening up their fundamental skills, another effort to fill the void left by Moses.
“People are going to look at (Moses’) scoring stats and wonder how we’re going to replace that, but I’m a little more worried about her rebounding actually. We’ve got a lot of work to do on the boards, both ends of the court, and she was also our primary ball handler. We kind of played positionless basketball so we didn’t run everything through (Moses) necessarily but she was the most comfortable with the ball in her hands so that kind of gravitated towards that,” said Jamie Evens. “We’ve been spending a lot of time this season getting everybody else comfortable handling the ball and obviously really working on some rebounding and defensive drills to get everybody to step up there as well.”
Similarly to the Gators, Smethport is also cueing in on immediate player development as essential for the upcoming season.
Coming off a 2-19 season that was vacant of a postseason berth, the Lady Hubbers found a silver lining in the fact that they welcomed back the vast majority of their roster. Of the 13 girls on the team, ten are returning to the Orange and White for another year while the other three are freshmen. Two of those freshmen, Cassidy Szuba and Mariah Tanner, step into a team that will immediately look to them for contributions.
“As far as development, it’s going to be interesting. We’re going to be actually leaning heavily on two freshmen this year to give us some really quality minutes at the varsity level. Their ability to progress quickly is going to be a key for us,” said Smethport head coach Chad Goodman. “Their hustle and their game-awareness (makes them stand out.) For such a young age, they both are very athletic.”
With Szuba and Tanner standing as the new blood, Payton Neff and Madelyn McKean carry the torch as the old guard. Having Neff as Smethport’s leading scorer last season at 9.6 point per game, also pulling down 4.6 rebounds, and McKean coming in as the primary ball handler and facilitator, averaging 6.8 points, 5.1 rebounds alongside 2.6 steals, the backcourt duo will be the life blood of the Lady Hubbers’ offense as they search for a way back into the District 9 Class 2A playoffs.
While their contemporaries look to compliment star power with a supporting cast, Otto-Eldred’s entire cast is seemingly filled with star power.
Two years removed from their District 9 Class A championships and graduating the last big pieces of that roster, the Lady Terrors entered last season with some serious question marks, specifically concerning their young roster. However, they emphatically found the answers, cruising to a 23-6 record that returned them to the D9 finals.
“I think that if you would have told people last year we were going to win 20 games they would have laughed at us,” said Otto-Eldred head coach Shawn Gray. “To get back to the District 9 title game and win 20 games was just absolutely fantastic.”
Coming into the 2025-2026 campaign, O-E’s youthful roster returns as they welcome back seven letterwinners, including Baylee Francis, a sophomore who led the team in scoring with 10.1 points a night, Rayel Hakes, a forward and junior who pulled down a team-high 6.9 rebounds and Ayla Van Scoter, another junior and all-around contributor who averaged 8.2 points, 4.5 rebounds, 1.9 assists and 1.3 steals.
Having another year of experience under their belt, as well as a roster full of names that can give opposing teams points in bunches – five of the returning letterwinners combined for 30.9 of O-E’s 44 average points per game – Gray and Co. are as ready as anybody to run it back, eager to stake their claim on both the league and the district.
“Our goals remain the same almost every year. Winning our tournament would be the first thing, get out to a good start, win the NTL and then have a chance to make some noise come playoff time,” said Gray. “I don’t even have to say it anymore. (The team) comes to me and says, ‘these are our goals,’ and that’s how we go into every year: expect to win every game and play well enough to win every game this year.”
