Last year, the Concord Christian Academy girls’ and boys’ basketball teams finished with a combined record of 14-7. This year it’s 30-1. The girls are undefeated at 16-0 and sit atop Division IV. The boys are in second place and have a 14-1 record.
On Monday night, both squads dealt out a drubbing to Sunapee. The boys won by 18 (57-39). The girls won by 56 (72-26).
CCA’s two teams couldn’t play the game more different if they tried. The boys’ team, made up of mostly juniors and seniors, has length and size at their disposal. They drive the ball inside and toss in acrobatic layups. Some of them can dunk.
The girls’ team has four eighth graders who all play consistently. Most of the lineup barely cracks the five-foot mark. Despite their size, or lack of it, the young squad picks teams apart with surgical passing and fundamentals that would make any coach grin.
They shoot lights out from behind the arc and make the extra pass to find open layups in the paint. On defense they are a smothering swarm, pressing and swiping for all 32 minutes.
So what’s the secret to the Kingsmen dominance on the court?
“They hate losing,” said girls assistant coach Matt Smith. “They don’t like to lose. They had just enough success at the end of last season. And they didn’t love how the season ended, so that motivated them to work all through the summer.”
“Our girls work really hard in the offseason as well as in season,” said girls head coach Rebecca Carlile. “We have a lot of really competitive girls who are always working on their game.”
All that offseason work has paid off well. The Concord Christian girls average 62 points per game.
“They’re really generous with sharing the ball,” said Carlile. “We don’t have anyone concerned about scoring individually. They want to win, and they share the ball unbelievably well.”
On the other end of the floor, the Lady Kingsmen know how to shut opponents down. They allow a miniscule 22 points per game. In most cases, the team plays a high press that chokes opposing offenses and prevents them from finding any rhythm.
“They enjoy playing defense,” said Smith. “Oftentimes we know coming in who the (opponent’s) No. 1 scorer is. And we have two or three girls who are saying, ‘I got her, I got her’. They’re up on the challenge.”
“They really just are fun girls to coach,” said Carlile. “Whether offensively or defensively, they want to share the possession, even defensively. You can’t just shut down one girl without having really good help. You can’t pressure the ball without having really good help defense.”
For the boys, coach Eric Heizer has kept it simple.
“The biggest turnaround from last year?” asked Heizer. “Everything starts with our defense and trying to play off of that and turn that into offense. So that’s probably the biggest thing I would say.”
That Kingsmen defense is no joke. The boys let up an average of just 46 points per game while scoring 68.
Teams must pick a poison when guarding Concord Christian’s stars. Either foul them to keep them from the rim, or watch as they jump over you and lay one in. Either way, only one team, undefeated Woodsville (14-0), has managed to best the Kingsmen.
But that doesn’t mean the team is a finished product, according to the coach.
“There’s plenty for us to work on,” said Heizer. “We can do better defensively. We can do better execution-wise on offense. There’s so many things that we can work on.
“And we’ve never been in this position, so we’re still learning as we’re going. So there’s a lot of lessons to be learned along the way. It doesn’t take much to kind of reset their focus and tell them we haven’t arrived yet.”
Both teams have one game left to play in the regular season.
After that, they will arrive in the postseason, where both will be gunning for their first title in program history.
“Looking forward to playoffs. We’ll see what happens,” said Carlile.