BOISE — Each fall, before the season starts, Boise girls basketball coach Kim Brydges begins weekly Tuesday lunch meetings with the Brave captains. Those meetings last throughout the basketball season.
Part of the weekly meetings is a book study of Jeff Janssen’s The Team Captain’s Leadership Manual. It’s a book Brydges said she’s been using with her captains for many years. She may need to find a new book for next season if she wants to avoid any repeated materials with junior captains Avery Howell and Sophia Clark.
Without any seniors on the roster this season, the Brave turned to two of its juniors to fill that leadership role. And behind their two captains, a group of sophomores have stepped up and helped keep things rolling.
Boise (21-2) claimed the 5A Southern Idaho Conference title this season and repeated as 5A District III Champions. The Brave will open the 5A State Tournament Thursday as the No. 4 seed, taking on No. 5 Owyhee in the first round. Boise is looking for its first state title since 2005.
“I think it’s good having two people who were willing to step up to it,” Howell, who leads the Brave with 20.7 points and 12.5 rebounds per game this season, said about the captain’s role. “But there’s a lot of other players on our team who also show up with the way they play and the energy they bring to practice.”
For Howell and Clark, this season always loomed as the season that they would be the ones who had to take the reins. With seniors like Ella Nelson, Ava Oakland and Ashley Banks all graduating from last year’s team, which advanced to the state title game, they could see it falling to them.
“Last year we lost six or seven seniors and we saw there wasn’t going to be any seniors this year,” said Clark. “Both Avery and I realized that was going to happen, so we both stepped up our intensity and brought a lot of energy to our team. I think that helped with our success.”
The foundation of that success began during the summer. Brydges said without any seniors, she was curious to see how her players adapted into filling new roles, as that is an important time to determine what the team’s culture would look like for the upcoming season. Almost immediately, she could see both Howell and Clark accepting their new roles, not that she had any doubts they would.
“Those guys just grabbed our team this summer and said ‘this is what we’re doing, this is how we do it’ and everyone just complied,” Brydges said. “I would credit those two captains for being a big part of our success. It was strange not having a senior night, because we always have senior night, but you wouldn’t know it in terms of our leadership. We have kids out there playing with the same type of senior mentality.”
They weren’t the only two to step up, however. Incoming sophomores, who were coming off their freshman season, like Avery Patricco, Kaity Haan and Alison Turcke also embraced the roles that they would have for the upcoming season.
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“We had six returning players, maybe,” said Patricco. “So, there were a lot of new people coming in. We just all clicked very fast and I think that helped up focus on what we needed to do and really get to work.”
With that foundation built, Brydges, Howell and Clark began their weekly lunch meetings, which included lessons from Janssen’s book. They would generally go over a chapter a week, but there were a few more complex chapters that they would spend multiple weeks on to make sure they had everything down.
Howell remembers one chapter, in particular, which dealt with how each individual player responds to different coaching and leadership styles in different ways. They thoroughly went through the roster and one-by-one discussed how that applied with every player on the team.
Clark pointed to a similar chapter that discussed making sure everyone was on the same page in terms of the work that needed to be done. The chapter pointed out that some days a teammate might have a good or bad day and how to deal with that. Clark remembers it being a difficult one because, again, everybody responds to different styles in different ways.
But through those difficult discussions, both captains saw the value in the book.
“I learned how to be a better leader,” Clark said. “I got some great tips from it and I got a better understanding of how to lead my teammates better and not have everything on me and Avery. Learning from that, it’s made Avery, I and the whole team better.”
Teammates saw it too, as both Howell and Clark have worked well off each other and helped lead the team in the direction they’ve been going.
“They have helped us so much with our energy at practice and how they make us all connect with each other,” said Haan. “When times are hard in games, or we’re not communicating the best, I feel like they really help pick that energy up.”
And just like any good leader, neither takes all the credit for the entirety of the success the Brave have had this season. They both know that it takes everyone on the court to drive the ship in the right direction. With the two juniors guiding the way, the sophomores have also stepped up in a big way and played above their years, as well.
“They all show a lot of maturity with the way they’re playing, but also in the way they are receiving what I say or what Sophia is saying,” Howell said. “During games they have open ears to what we’re trying to get across or the message we’re trying to send. A lot of times that’s hard to do, just listen. But I think all of them do a good job and they’re also mature with the way they play, which is good for our team.”
