GA’s Finelli wins Willard Award

Aimee Willard Award winner Niki Finelli expects to play basketball at Harvard as a guard or a wing player.

by TOM UTESCHER

Each year the Girls Inter-Ac league presents the Aimee Willard Award to the outstanding three-sport athlete in the graduating class, and the 2005 winner certainly fits the bill.

A Germantown Academy “lifer,” Niki Finelli was the captain of league championship teams in cross country, basketball, and lacrosse this year. An outstanding student, she’ll attend Harvard University, where she plans to continue her basketball career.

Speaking of the Aimee Willard honor, Finelli said, “I looked at the brochure they put out with the names of the past winners and the nominees from all the schools. They were amazing athletes who went on to play for great colleges, and it’s really special to be a part of that.”

“You could’ve written the criteria for the award with Niki in mind,” remarked Ginny Hofmann, Finelli’s lacrosse coach and GA’s Associate Athletic Director. “She’s a fabulous three-sport athlete, a great person, and a great leader. She works hard in every sport, and she’s a positive influence at our school in every area.”

Judy Krouse was the Willard winner’s cross country coach, and also her history teacher.

“She’s so dedicated to anything that she does, whether it’s in athletics or in the classroom. You can count on her to get the job done, because you know she’s always going to give you one hundred-percent.”

Not surprisingly, Patriots basketball coach Sherri Retif concurs with her colleagues, commenting, “Niki is the type of player who shows up at clutch times – prime time. She has an excellent work ethic and she’s highly respected by all of her peers. She’s the glue to any team she’s on.”

A National Merit Scholar and a member of the Cum Laude Society, Finelli was invited to make official recruiting visits to Dartmouth, Yale, and Harvard. After traveling to the first two schools, she still wasn’t sure where she’d end up, but her final visit, to Harvard, settled the matter.

“I realized I wanted to be near a city,” she explained, “and for all the things I wanted in a college campus, Harvard was the perfect fit.”

Although she’s an accomplished linguist who has won numerous awards for her proficiency in French, Finelli said “I’m really interested in the sciences; math and biology. My parents are both doctors, and I have that same interest. I know I definitely want to follow a pre-Med path, but I don’t know exactly where it will lead. For my senior project, I did sort of an internship with one of my coaches, Lisa Miller [a basketball assistant], who’s a personal trainer. After working with her, I think that sports medicine is something that I’d like to look into.”

Basketball is another interest that originated with her parents, particularly her mother. Back in college, Finelli’s mother – then Lorrie Gable – played for the Immaculata teams that were national runners-up in 1975 and ’76.

“She always told me stories about playing in college,” remembers the GA athlete. “I could see the passion she had for the game, and it kind of trickled down to me.”

Although she’s a good ballhandler, the six-foot Finelli spent much of her senior season at GA positioned in the paint because she was one of the tallest players on the squad.

“At Harvard they think I’ll be a guard or a wing player, which makes me happy because that’s more of my natural position,” she relates.

One of her fellow freshmen on the team will be Emma Moretzsohn, a 6’6” center from Downingtown East High School. She’ll also be reunited with 2004 GA graduate Lauren Freid, who has given her glowing reports of the program and her future teammates.

Last winter, the Crimson finished 20-8 overall, and shared the Ivy League championship with Dartmouth. The team’s mentor, Kathy Delaney-Smith, is also the head coach for the U.S. Team that will play at the World University Games this August.

“I think she’ll be a good fit for Harvard,” opined GA’s Retif, “because she’s fundamentally sound and she’s got the whole package. She can be a finesse player, or she can score with her back to the basket.”

The GA coach appreciated the sacrifices Finelli made for the Patriots, pointing out, “She was our leading scorer, while also having to guard one of the other team’s best post players every game. At the tournament we went to in December (the Nike Holiday Hoopfest), she averaged 20 points a game against some of the top teams in California. Later in the season, she played through the flu to help us win the Inter-Ac.”

It was the fifth league title for Finelli, who started to play on the varsity squad as an eighth grader.

While basketball has always been with her, cross country and lacrosse are more recent additions. Towards the end of her grade school years, she gave up soccer in the fall to start preparing for the hoops season, and in middle school softball gave way to lacrosse as her spring sport. She found that the fall cross country season meshed well with basketball, and she also began to enjoy the sport in its own right. In seventh grade, she worked out with the varsity runners, and the following year she was allowed to participate in high school meets.

Coach Krouse noted “There’s a Nike ad that says ‘You either ran today, or you didn’t,’ and Niki is someone who always ran or practiced. She was willing to put in the work to improve, and she’s a real competitor. If we said to her, ‘Niki,’ you’ve got to pass this girl in front of you,’ she’d just nod her head and do it.”

In lacrosse, she started out as a defender and later moved up to play midfield, making the varsity team as a tenth grader.

“She was a bit of an unsung hero in the midfield,” Hofmann said, “because people didn’t always notice all the work she did. She created a lot of positive turnovers

This summer, Finelli is keeping her hoops skills sharp by playing with the Fencor 18-year-old AAU team. Her future college teammate, Moretzsohn, is also a member of the squad, which has already won the Mid-Atlantic tournament and will play at the national championships in Orlando next month.

Looking back on her long tenure at Germantown Academy, Finelli muses “It’s been an amazing ride. They prepare you so well academically, and there’s such a close relationship between the teachers and the students. It was also great to be at a school that values athletics as much as I enjoy participating in them.”