Springside’s Fuery leads national hoops champs
by TOM UTESCHER
Next month when Springside School seventh graders are discussing what they did during summer vacation, winning a national championship will be high on the list for basketball player Kristen Fuery.
Kristen was a mainstay for the 12-year-old Renegades club team which won the AAU 12-and-Under Division II National Tournament that was staged in Nashville, TN July 4 through 11. The post player from Springside emerged as the high scorer for the entire tournament, averaging 22 points per game.
“Some of the teams we played had two or three girls on me, trying to shut me down,” she relates. “When they did that, I just started passing to my teammates.”
Kristen is already 5'10" and is expected to gain a few more inches before she stops growing. In addition to scoring from under the basket, she’s got an accurate jump shot from the high post, and shoots around 65-percent from the floor.
While she doesn’t have any specific basketball role models within her immediate family, she was probably predestined to be an athlete. Her mother, Hope, was formerly a tennis coach at Germantown Academy, and her father, Jack, was a track and field coach for many years at Upper Dublin and William Tennent high schools. Upper Dublin’s varsity girls basketball coach, Vince Catanzarro, is the coach of Kristen’s Renegades club team.
Always one of the tallest girls in her class, Kristen began to play AAU ball when she was nine years old. She entered Springside in the fifth grade, and now, as a seventh grader, she’ll be able to start playing interscholastic ball for the Lions’ middle school team.
Her Renegades squad enjoyed moderate success last summer, but everyone felt that 2004 was really going to be their year to excel.
“We did very well in tournaments this year, so we were looking to place in the top four going into nationals,” she says.
Unfortunately, two of the Renegades’ starting players were injured during the regional tournament in which teams qualify for the Division I nationals. Finishing fifth, the squad missed the cut-off, but was still able to enter the Division II tourney.
For the event in Nashville, over 40 teams from around the nation were randomly seeded for play in 11 separate pools. First time out, Kristen chalked up 37 points as her team blew by the Alabama Twisters. The Renegades finished first in their pool to earn a place in the winners’ bracket. They went through the draw without a loss, topping the Georgia Pistols in the final, 44-40. Kristen had 20 points and nine rebounds in that game.
According to tournament rules, the first-place team in the losers’ bracket is allowed to challenge the victors of the winners’ bracket. Here the Delaware Valley squad suffered its lone setback of the tournament, falling 49-37 to the Tennessee Lady Tigers. This left both teams with one loss, so they squared off again the same afternoon to determine national bragging rights once and for all. With Kristen supplying 11 points and six boards, the Renegades prevailed, 43-40.
Playing hoops has become a year-round exercise for the young Springsider, who’s been invited to play this fall with a team of elite middle school players sponsored by Tri-State Sports in Aston, PA. At Springside, she’ll play middle school ball this year, but it’s likely that she’ll move up to varsity next year as an eighth grader. The Lions’ new varsity coach is Steve Flynn, the director of the Renegades AAU organization.
Whatever the future holds, Kristen can always look back with pride upon her achievements this summer.
As she puts it, “It was just a mind-blowing experience.”