Three-peat could be just the beginning for Bishop Guertin girls basketball

Brad Kreick shared a fact after last Saturday's Division I championship game about the Bishop Guertin High School girls basketball team that put the team's most recent title in a big of perspective.

With a group of media members gathered around him following the Cardinals' third championship in his three years as head coach, Kreick revealed that getting to open gym in the summer and fall, before the season started, wasn't always easy for his players.

"We started the open gyms with three kids who even had a driver’s license," the coach said. "The difference between September and October and (last Saturday), the basketball is one thing, but watching these kids grow up, they kind of go from a goofy bunch of kids to mature young women has been amazing."

Of the seven girls who played more than 10 minutes in Bishop Guertin's 54-34 win over Pinkerton Academy, six are sophomores. The Cardinals lose just one senior from the group, and there were three juniors on the roster this season.

The other eight players were all sophomores, and most of them not only were a part of this year's title, but played a crucial role in last year's championship, too.

But even with that experience coming into the season, Kreick felt it was the four games the Cardinals played out-of-state during the regular season that helped them prepare for the playoffs. Loses to LaSalle Academy (from Providence), Conard High School (from West Hardford), Bishop Feehan High School (from Attelboro, Mass.) and Mercy High School (from Middletown, Conn.) by an average of 15.3 points showed the Cardinals how far they had to go.

While Kreick never questioned if the players would get there, he wondered if it would be this season or next, particularly after a 20-point loss at Bishop Feehan.

"We never had a question whether we were going to be OK, but going on the road like that, and you get hammered the way we got hammered, you know you’re going to eventually grow up, but is it going to be this year or next year," he said. "When is it going to be? That was a critical juncture of our season. The kids decided to make a commitment to each other. We got better and better. That was probably the low point if there was a low point."

The Cardinals lost just two more times in the regular season after that - at Bedford by five points and at home against Mercy by eight.

Those tough moments during the year then helped Bishop Guertin when it trailed in the quarterfinals at Merrimack, when it faced a late run by Bedford in the semifinals, and when the Cardinals started slow in the final.

"You see it on the court, but I’m as proud of what they did off the basketball court and how they came together and how they learned how to work every day," Kreick said. "They learned from some tough times. We got it put to us early on by some good basketball teams and they just figured out how to grow from it."

The comparisons to other girls basketball dynasties were already being thrown around after the title game. Bishop Guertin's three straight titles in Division I, formerly Class L, are behind only Manchester Central (four in a row from 1978-81) and Nashua (1985-89) and Winnacunnet (2007-11), which each won five straight.