Maddy Siegrist had been carefully monitoring her telephone.
Siegrist, then a seventh grader, had tried out for the St. Martin De Porres basketball group earlier within the day, and the coach was alleged to name gamers that evening to allow them to know whether or not they made the A-team or the B-team. Ultimately, Siegrist’s telephone rang. She didn’t just like the information: She had made solely the B-team.
With tear-filled eyes and quivering lips, Siegrist advised her dad and mom, who at first puzzled if one thing extra critical had occurred.
“I’m like, ‘It’s OK, honey, it can work out,’” her father, George Siegrist, recalled whereas laughing. “And she or he’s saying, ‘No, Daddy, it gained’t.”
In order that November evening in 2013, George Siegrist remembers his daughter turning on the lights of their driveway and placing up photographs till it was time for mattress. That winter, she started shoveling heavy snow in that driveway to make method for follow. The next yr, Siegrist made the A-team — and hasn’t performed on a B-team since.
“That was a turning level in her early profession,” mentioned George Siegrist, who performed faculty basketball at Marist. “She determined that she didn’t like having that feeling.”
“I’m an excellent aggressive particular person.,” Maddy Siegrist mentioned, “and I by no means wished to be on a second group once more.”
Siegrist, now a 6-foot-2 Villanova ahead, has developed into probably the greatest gamers in Division I basketball, main the division in scoring and breaking data en path to securing her group a fourth seed on this yr’s N.C.A.A. ladies’s match, the place Villanova (28-6) will host No. 13 Cleveland State (30-4) on Saturday. In a yr wherein it appeared like Villanova basketball may fade from prominence due to the retirement of the varsity’s males’s coach, Jay Wright, Siegrist’s season has put her amongst Philadelphia’s greatest sports activities stars.
“It was sort of like, right here’s a chance to essentially make some noise and make our mark, and you recognize it’s actually drawing consideration,” Villanova coach Denise Dillon mentioned. “If you put out a very good product, and you’ve got a star folks wish to see — folks come out.”
Philadelphia is understood for its crazed sports activities followers, notably for skilled groups just like the Eagles and the Sixers. Followers are notorious for climbing greased poles and reveling within the streets in celebration. For a lot of the Nineteen Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, the Temple males’s coach, John Chaney, captured the town’s consideration with aggressive seasons and a number of deep match runs.
However for a lot of the final twenty years, Villanova — with two males’s basketball championships — has additionally captured its share of native consideration. Now, consideration at Villanova has shifted towards the ladies’s program, primarily due to Siegrist’s play. “They deal with Maddy in the identical method they deal with the Sixers,” mentioned Wright, who retired after final season.
Wright remembers arriving at his workplace as early as 7 a.m. some days and leaving as late as 10 p.m., and looking his window as a result of he would hear a basketball bouncing from the close by ladies’s follow health club. “I’d at all times simply examine to see, like, who can be in there this late or who can be in there this early?” Wright mentioned. “And it was at all times Maddy.”
Siegrist’s most spectacular sport this season got here when she scored 50 factors towards Seton Corridor. That evening, she confirmed her versatility on offense, utilizing publish and dribble strikes for scores, and in addition operating and making sharp cuts with out the ball to get herself open. Her 50 factors had been a program and a convention document, and Siegrist achieved the feat in solely 32 minutes, a comparatively low quantity of taking part in time for her.
“We don’t typically get to provide her a relaxation,” mentioned Dillon, who mentioned she had taken Siegrist out of the sport earlier than being notified by Villanova’s sports activities data director that she was near breaking the varsity document for factors in a sport, after which near scoring 50. “So we stored her on the market when she acquired to 50, however I jokingly was like, ‘We’re urgent our luck right here.’”
Jalen Brunson, a former Villanova guard who now performs for the Knicks, mentioned Villanova ought to retire Siegrist’s jersey “as soon as she’s done” after that efficiency.
At Villanova’s subsequent sport towards St. John’s, dozens of followers, largely younger women, rushed to the underside of the stands after the sport carrying pens, markers, and papers as they vied for Siegrist’s autograph, which she signed after scoring 39 factors and 11 rebounds within the win.
“I can bear in mind how impressionable I used to be at that age watching different proficient faculty gamers, so that you simply wish to be an important function mannequin for them,” Siegrist mentioned.
When she was the identical age as these autograph-seekers, she thought her basketball profession was over after being left off the St. Martin De Porres A-team. She and her household are nonetheless shut with the coach, Jerry Fiore, who was on the opposite finish of the telephone name that evening a few years in the past. Fiore has even attended a few of her video games this season; nobody lets him overlook that second.
“, he helped Maddy turn into the participant she is,” George Siegrist mentioned.
Supply: NY Times
