Apr 6, 2019 5 min read

It is an entity to itself.

There are eight steps.

The elbow must stay in.

You can’t shoot the ball from your forehead.

There is an ever-so-slight pause in the air while at the top of your jump as the delivery comes from the wrist, fingers or forearm.

And Makenna Marisa wasn’t going to be able to copy it from somebody else because she probably would never see it, at least done correctly.

That’s what Rudy Marisa, who was the longtime Waynesburg College men’s basketball coach, strongly believes about the jump shot. He believed in the eight-step jump shot back when he guided the Yellow Jackets to 565 wins and the NAIA District 18 championship seven times.

Many of those seasons began with the same George Lehmann shooting video, explaining the basics of the jump shot, that he showed to his granddaughter Makenna months ago. That’s the same video that Chartiers Valley girls basketball coach Tim McConnell and Washington girls coach Ron Moore watched when they played for Marisa at Waynesburg.

“We were sitting around in the dining room and had an old television on the table,” Makenna Marisa remembers. “It was a really old film and was just played over and over again.”

Some things never change.

But what changed for Marisa, who will follow in her family’s footsteps to Penn State and play for recently hired Nittany Lions women’s basketball coach Carolyn Kieger this fall, was an unmatched work ethic that many, including custodians who shut down the gym at Peters Township High School, could even appreciate.

She knew them, and those same janitors knew her for late nights in and out of season, times when her car was the only one in the parking lot as she walked out with her backpack on and a basketball under her arm.

“I talked to them and thanked them every single time I would stay and shoot,” Marisa said, trying to continue cleaning up the jump shot taught by her grandfather. “(The custodians) chose to stay. I remember one coming up to me and saying that he sees me in there most nights and loves how hard I work.”

It all paid off.

After going undefeated in the regular season, a Washington County girls basketball first, Marisa-led Peters Township won the WPIAL championship and then became only the fourth girls team in district history to win a state championship with a perfect record (30-0). For those efforts, she has been named the Observer-Reporter Girls Basketball Player of the Year.

“I did get really emotional, not that night but the next day on the bus ride home from Hershey,” Marisa said.

Behind 29 points, seven rebounds and seven assists from Marisa, Peters Township dominated Garnet Valley 62-49 to win the PIAA Class 6A title, the first state championship by a girls team Washington County. It was the Indians’ 26th victory by double-digit points.

“All the hard work had worked up to this,” Marisa continued. “It was just the perfect ending.”

In her senior season, Marisa averaged 20.8 points, 6.1 rebounds and 4.3 assists per game. She scored in double figures in every game except one, shooting an efficient 53 percent from the field with the jumper she learned from her grandfather.

“I first noticed at the age of six or seven, she was bouncing the ball between her legs in the house,” Rudy Marisa remembers. “I never associated it with the possibility that it would pay off in being a basketball player. I could see the improvement slowly but surely each year. She worked with myself, Tim McConnell on some occasions, a ball-handling expert from Belle Vernon. I never questioned that guy when I saw how well she was handling the ball. I was bound and determined to try to help her on the jump shot. And the coaches she had at Peters Township spent countless hours with her.”

It begged the question sometimes, even from her parents, was Marisa shooting enough?

“A couple of years ago, coaches from big-time programs starting coming to watch her play,” Marisa’s mother Donna remembers. “She was passing the ball to everybody. We told her it was nice to share, but you have all these coaches there and aren’t showing them what you can do. We were concerned about her not getting the recognition that she should. Then she taught us a lesson.”

Unselfish in her pursuit for a Division I scholarship, Marisa continued to pass in order to make whatever team she played on better, garnering praise from opposing coaches of what made her so good was that she made all of her teammates better.

“It’s good to sometimes be cocky on the floor and show what you have,” Marisa said. “I don’t feel the need to do it. That’s just the way I am. That’s just the way I play.”

She still finished her career at Peters Township with 1,720 points.

The final points came as Rudy Marisa sat in the very top row of the Peters Township section at the Giant Center. One row away from the concourse with one person, his nephew, in the row with him.

“I didn’t want to walk down those steps,” said the elder Marisa, who now walks with the help of a cane.

“But from a selfish standpoint, I really like to just concentrate on the game. When you are down amongst the other fans it makes it pretty tough. I was in full view. That last game was a culmination of all her work and effort. It was almost storybook. Her dream came true. Frankly, that game more or less cemented what we believed all along. She is a very bonafide player.”