Rebuilding Year for Fontbonne Academy Hoops

Last year's basketball team featured four of the better players to ever throw on a Ducks uniform. The team finished with a 22-2 record and fell to Oliver Ames in the South Sectional tournament.

This year, those days are gone.

All four players graduated and will now only take in Ducks' games as spectator. Head coach Clare Murphy will miss all Alexis Peters, Katie King, Ari Renwick and Amy Connelly, but life must move on.

Peters was the general of the Ducks team during her four-year career. She finshed off her career with 1,000 points and now those point guard duties will fall into the hands of freshman Rebecca Olivieri.

Olivieri and Peters are very different in their games, according to Murphy, but the head coach is hoping that her new point guard will be able to step in just like her old point guard did four years ago.

"She's a nice little point guard who is very good with both hands," said Murphy. "She gets the ball up the floor. She's a scrappy defender and we are comfortable enough to put the ball in her hands as a freshman.

"Alexis was more of a scorer right from the beginning," Murphy added, "where Rebecca is a lot more of a passing point guard looking to get teammates involved."

The Ducks runs a three-guard offense, and since Murphy lost her entire backcourt from last year, she still needed to fill in two spots.

Enter Georgia Bourikas and Ali Rezendes.

Bourikas is a 5-foot-7 guard who can fill the lane and hit the 3 if needed. Murphy will be leaning on her heavily to fill the stat sheet, while Rezendes will be asked to do all the things that will never appear in the box score.

"She's very steady and she's a do-it-all type of player," said Murphy. "She does all the little things to help the team score."

Filling in for Amy Connelly will be Jenn Gemma, but even her status is up in the air. Gemma suffered her second concussion in a matter of months this fall, and Murphy is being very cautios with her player. The 5-foot-11-inch sophomore played huge minutes off the bench last year, and if she misses significant time it could be another blow to the inexperienced team.

With all of the factors kind of going against the Ducks, Murphy still remains optimistic about the season. It could be one of those years where she won't know what she has until the middle of the season, but 10 wins means there in, so that's a goal they have to shoot for.

"We definitely have the ability, but we will just go through some growing pains early," said Murphy. "It's a hard working group. They are very coachable. They want to play hard. It's going to take some time but we have the expectations of getting to the state tournament again."