Before Ashlee Dukette was wreaking havoc on the Division III landscape for the Newfound Regional girls’ basketball team, before she was pulling down rebounds at an alarming rate, and well before she was piling up the kinds of numbers usually reserved for video games, Dukette was afraid to shoot.
“She was just too scared to shoot an air ball so she really didn’t make a whole lot of baskets up until she got to high school,” said Ashlee’s mother, Erin Dukette. “She was always up underneath the basket and she would catch the ball and throw it off to somebody else … She would never shoot. When she was in sixth, seventh, eighth grade, one of her coaches actually got on his hands and knees and started screaming, ‘I won’t yell at you if you just shoot the ball.”’
Ashlee Dukette’s come a long way since then. Off the court, she still carries the same reserved, bashful personality that nearly gave her AAU coach a heart attack, and she would still much rather deflect to teammates or coaches than draw any attention to herself. On the court, however, the spotlight can’t help but find her.
Eleven games into the season and Dukette has posted averages of 20 points, 14 rebounds, six steals and two blocks per game – all while leading the Bears to an unblemished record more than halfway into the year.
“She does a lot of those things that people don’t typically look at,” Newfound Coach Karri Peterson said of the sophomore guard. “You think someone that’s scoring 26 points, 28 points, you’d be like, ‘Wow, they must be just going to town,’ but she gets it in so many different ways. … She just does so many things out there that it’s not necessarily that person that has the ball in their hands all the time and always getting the shots or the drives to the basket.”
In a lot of ways, her personality mimics her style of play on the hardwood: far from flashy and quietly going about her business. When she leaps high into the air with her 5-foot-10 frame for an offensive rebound over a hapless defender, or blocks a shot attempt into the backboard, her facial expression is the same as if she were simply pumping gas.
“I just get embarrassed really easily so I don’t like to smile,” Dukette said. “I feel of proud of myself, but I also don’t like to draw attention to myself.”
“It’s just her personality,” Erin Dukette added. “She never gets really excited or really upset about anything … In the town of Danbury, I went down to the store this morning and everyone says they read the paper every morning to see what she did for points. So I think she likes to hear that she did well, but she doesn’t like to brag about it.”
It’s hard not to brag when you produce lines like Ashlee Dukette’s.
During a Jan. 6 contest against Inter-Lakes, the sophomore poured in 29 points in a full line that included 14 rebounds, nine steals, six blocks and three assists. A few days later against Berlin, Dukette posted a monster 25-point, 11-rebound, 12-steal triple-double in a statement win for the Bears over the Mountaineers. And it didn’t stop there.
Just this past week Dukette added another triple-double to her resume with 19 points, 20 rebounds and 10 steals against Mascoma and then in a “quiet” game against White Mountains, delivered 12 points and 24 rebounds.
“We know everybody is a big part of the team and we have special things that all of us have to fulfill and (Dukette) is one of the main people who we look at for being a big part of the team,” Newfound guard and teammate Savanna Bony said after the Bears defeated White Mountains on Jan. 20.
Dukette is especially hard to guard from the shooting guard position, where her height creates mismatch problems for most Division III defenses. If opponents choose to cover Dukette with their center or a bigger body, she simply uses her speed to blow by them, or she steps outside for a 3-pointer. And if the opponent has somehow found a defense to slow down Dukette, which doesn’t happen often, she simply allows the other Bears to take control.
“She just lets the game flow and finds her time to score when it kind of goes with the game,” Peterson said. “It’s kind of like a difficult matchup because of her size because even though she plays guard, they’re not going to put a guard on her because she’s going to go inside and post them up.”
Above all else, perhaps the scariest thing for the rest of the division is that Dukette still has two seasons left in the Newfound green, and she’s only going to get better.
“She’s still learning how to play basketball. She’s still trying to understand exactly what she needs to do and work on some of those things with her on how to shoot correctly and getting better ball handling and stuff like that,” Peterson said. “She’s always working to become a better player.”