Dec 11, 2017 4 min read

What Chartiers-Houston girls basketball coach Laura Montecalvo stressed to the Bucs last season didn’t require luck or a ton of skill.

All that was needed was a well-conditioned team and constant hustle.

Those two elements, combined with a lockdown defense – C-H allowed only five opponents to score at least 40 points – led to the Bucs becoming the first school in Washington County in 25 years to win a WPIAL girls basketball title. The Bucs were only the third team from the county to win a WPIAL girls basketball championship.

“We focused a lot of our attention on defense,” Montecalvo said. “We became proud of holding teams to low scores and knowing we could control that every single night. There are some things you can’t control, like making shots. We focused on what we could control.”

What Montecalvo and the Bucs couldn’t control was the graduation of guard Jala Walker, who provided consistent secondary behind Alexa Williamson at 13 points per game. But the importance of Walker went beyond her scoring. She was in charge of bringing the ball up the court, setting up the offense and forcing opponents into turnovers on the defensive end.

Replacing Walker has been one of the main focuses of the offseason for the Bucs, who are relying on several returning starters to get back to the Peterson Events Center this season.

“That’s been a huge focus in the offseason,” Montecalvo said about continuing to develop C-H’s guard play. “We are doing some different things, not exactly similar to what we did last year, to be able and convert in those situations. It’s a work in progress.”

Having a veteran group is helping that process and enabled Chatiers-Houston to start the season with a 1-1 record in the Trinity tournament held over the weekend.

Seniors Macy Mazutis, who came off the bench for substantial minutes last season, and Maddie Simpson, a starter a year ago, will be tasked with setting up the offense.

Chartiers-Houston also returns three others from last year’s starting lineup in Julia Vulcano, Keaira Walker and Williamson, a Temple recruit who averaged 23 points, 12.5 rebounds and four blocked shots per game last season in her return from a season-ending knee injury as a sophomore.

“Those girls have been in a variety of different situations over their four years,” Montecalvo said. “They have those situations to fall back on. They’ve been in situational basketball. In those bigger situations, conditioning is a huge factor for us. We are a small school. We don’t have a large team. We focus heavily on conditioning so that in the third and fourth quarter of games we have the ability to pick up the tempo, if we need to.”

Though they are defending WPIAL champions, that is something the Bucs do not not talk about. Last year’s postseaosn is simply a motivating factor as they want to get deeper into the PIAA playoffs than they did last season when they exited in the second round with a loss to Bellwood-Antis.

Chartiers-Houston has a difficult schedule as the Bucs played Class 6A Canon-McMillan and Class 5A Moon in the Trinity tournament, will play Class 3A Charleroi and will participate in a tournament in Florida.

“We have a very difficult schedule planned,” Montecalvo said. “The teams we are playing in Florida are as big or bigger (in students) than North Allegheny. When you play tough competition, your weaknesses can be exposed. We want to do that. We want to get better. Our ultimate goal is to prepare as much as we can to be ready by mid-February.”