Bow, Hollis Brookline looking to hang with teams at top of D2 girls basketball standings

At 6-foot-2, Jessica Chamberlin doesn’t look like your typical playmaker, but that’s what she’s become for a refocused Bow High School girls basketball team.

After losing early games to top Division II teams Hanover and Pembroke, Bow made adjustments on both sides of the ball. Offensively, the Falcons (6-2) decided to run things through Chamberlin, and the result has been four straight wins with Bow averaging 51 points per game during the streak, a nice jump from the 41.3 average in the team’s first four games.

“Jessica Chamberlin has been instrumental,” Bow coach Phil Davis said. “She’s been selfless in this whole situation. She’s not a ball handler, but she’s a smart basketball player and an excellent distributor of the ball and that’s how we’re utilizing her. It doesn’t matter if she’s distributing from the inside or the outside, she’s done a great job of really keeping our offense going.”

The losses against Hanover and Pembroke also showed the Falcons they have enough depth to make it a weapon on the defensive side of the ball. The embodiment of that realization is sophomore Sydney Roberge, who has become Bow’s top rebounder at 13.0 per game and one of the team’s best defensive players. She helped slow down Hollis Brookline’s Elisabeth Stapelfeld in Tuesday’s 52-44 win and she’s probably cemented a place in the starting lineup with her contributions.

“She’s a rebounding machine, she’s a defensive presence, she’s a distributor,” Davis said of Roberge. “With some of the absences of other players, her increased minutes have given her more of a spotlight and she’s probably moving into the starting lineup for the rest of the year after her performances the last three weeks. I mean, you just can’t take someone out who does what Sydney does.”

She has plenty of help on the defensive end, starting with juniors Lyndsey and Bella LaPerle on the ball at the point of attack, and Chamberlin and Alex Larrabee down low. That depth shows on the other end with a balanced scoring attack led by talented sophomore Juliette Tarsa (14.3 points per game), Larrabee (12.4 ppg), senior Madison Speckman (12.1 ppg) and Chamberlin (8.2 ppg), who mixes in a few buckets when she’s not passing.

Last season, Bow’s moment of clarity didn’t come until the end of the campaign when the Falcons lost to a tough Merrimack Valley team. That’s when Bow players and staff fully realized what they needed to do to take their game to the next level, but they didn’t have time to implement the changes. That’s not the case this year.

“We had that ‘A-ha!’ moment at the end of last season, and this year I think we were fortunate to run into Hanover and Pembroke early,” Davis said. “People might be foolish to think Pembroke is not a great team, because they are. They’re going to be there at the end and they identified our weaknesses right out of the gates, so that’s what we’ve been working on.”

Hollis Brookline coach Bob Murphy hopes his team has that ‘A-ha!’ moment at some point during its current stretch of games against the iron of D-II. After starting the season 6-0, the Cavaliers have dropped three of their last four with the losses coming at 9-1 Pembroke (61-33 on Jan. 6), against 6-2 Bow (52-44 on Tuesday) and at 9-0 Hanover (54-34 on Thursday). And things don’t get much easier for HB with Saturday’s game against Merrimack Valley (9-1) and the Jan. 18 contest against Laconia (9-2).

“We need to beat somebody above us in the standings and we haven’t don’t that yet,” Murphy said. “When we play these teams, like a Hanover or a Bow, I point out to the kids, ‘This is the way you play defense.’ They play the way I’ve been asking our kids to play their whole career – you have to get up in the girls’ face, you have to deny the pass and you have to get in position to rebound. The good teams do that and we need to do it, too.”

Murphy believes his players have the ability and drive to make those improvements, it’s just a matter of getting it done.

“We’ve got a lot of talent on this team, and I feel really good about the depth we have,” the coach said. “I don’t have any problems subbing like we’ve had in the past. I don’t feel like we lose a beat when we put these kids in. But we’ve got to get more kids rebounding and we got to get more kids scoring.”

He has one kid scoring a ton, and that would be Staplefeld, the hard-driving guard who is averaging an impressive 23.7 points per game.

“Stapelfeld is the difference maker for them,” Bow’s Davis said. “She’s an incredible player and in my opinion she’s the best player we’ve faced, and we’ve faced Hanover and (Stella) Galanes. Galanes is a great player, but she’s got a lot of help around her and Stapelfeld is just so hard to guard.”

The Cavaliers also have one kid is doing a ton of work on the glass, and that would be Cheyenne Colbert, who is averaging a whopping 13.0 rebounds per game.

“We need multiple players rebounding and playing some good defense,” Murphy re-iterated.

Like so many other teams, Hollis Brookline has been impacted by health issues this season. The Cavaliers lost three starters earlier in the season, which is one of the reasons for the lopsided score against Pembroke.

But the team, still shorthanded, did respond in its next game, a 68-54 win at Souhegan (3-6) on Jan. 8. Freshmen Sabrina Hill and Cameron Dunn both got extended playing time in that game and Murphy said those young players, “actually won the game for us.” The starters did come back in time for the game against Bow, but they had a lot of rust to knock off in that one.

“When kids are out this season, they’re probably not in a gym, they’re probably quarantined somewhere, and they’re not touching a basketball, so if you’re not touching a ball for five days you lose your touch,” Murphy said. “That’s not an excuse, that’s happened to a lot of teams this season. I’m almost glad it happened to us during the middle of the season versus the end of the season.

“If something like that happens just before the playoffs, you’re not going very far in the playoffs.”