But avoid the temptation of letting the final three games of the 2007-2008 campaign detract from the first 23 games.
Or perhaps, more specifically, the middle 16.
Between December 28, 2007, and February 16, 2008, the women's basketball team at John Carroll posted a record of 13-3. That is about as good of a stretch of basketball that the Blue Streaks have played in its history.
This includes the halcyon days of the early 1990's, when the likes of Cindy Shumaker, Darlene Sheehan, Beth Arrowsmith, Michelle Bielozer and Sue Zidanic patrolled the hardwood at what was then simply known as Carroll Gym.Roxanne Allen took over the program in 1990, and promptly built it into a contender. The Blue Streaks had the misfortune of being a very good team at a time when Capital University was a very great team in the same Ohio Athletic Conference. Those Crusaders won back-to-back national titles in years in which JCU was a combined 40-12.
Allen's departure led to some very lean years. Promisng non-conference results would eventually give in to some massive losing streaks. The rock bottom year was 1997-98, when JCU went 6-20 -- just four seasons removed from a 20-6 record.
Kristie Maravalli took over, and slowly but steadily built a respectable program. But despite the best efforts of the likes of Katie Benjamin, Meagan Heller, Katie Walsh and Shayla Bell, the Blue Streaks could never seemingly get over the hump of respectablility and into the sacred ground of contender.
2007-2008 started out in a similar way. Two wins through the first six games, followed by a third consecutive loss in conference play on December 15. But in that loss, a player stepped in named Lee Jennings that would help turn the fortunes around.
An All-Ohio player for Stow High School, Jennings had led her team to the state championship game as a senior. All set to be the crown jewel of Bowling Green State University's freshmen class, Jennings would turn down the opportunity to play scholarship basketball after just two weeks at the school.
A connection with former Stow coach Jeff Camp would lead her to John Carroll's door, and the rest, as they say, is history. It started with a tournament title at Wittenberg, and that was followed by a pair of five-game winning streaks. Included in that good fortune was a mammoth seven-game road winning streak.
Although JCU would eventually run out of gas and drop consecutive games to Baldwin-Wallace and Wilmington in the final week of the regular season, the Blue Streaks had finally become a contender. John Carroll tied preseason favorite Capital and Otterbein for fourth place in the OAC (its highest finish since 1993-94).
More importantly, John Carroll will return its entire starting five and nearly 94 percent of its scoring offense. The only two seniors on the team, Abby Baum and Molly Scholla, will be missed for their leadership, but only take 55 points out of the team's production of 1,797 with them.
It was a long and circuitous route that John Carroll took from its back-to-back 20-win seasons to reach the 15-win plateau again. With Jennings, Rachael Price, Whitney Hamilton, Erin Zahariev, Caitlin Sureck, Laura Gruber and Alex D'Amico returning as a nucleus, Maravalli could be one solid recruiting class away from -- dare we say -- making a run at the school's first ever OAC women's basketball title.
We dare! We dare!
