This was some 10 years ago, around the time Nick O’Neil took over as the head coach at Cardinal O’Hara. He had a lot of new ideas, and one burning question: Why didn’t the girls basketball players in the Buffalo area get better recruited? O’Neil posed the question to some of the women’s college coaches in town, like Jada Pierce at Niagara or Felisha Legette-Jack of the University at Buffalo.
“They told me they needed to see girls against the same competition that they recruit when they go to these tournaments and AAU events,” O’Neil recalled. “When they come to high school games they want to see you against the girls at the top. Back then, a lot of school weren’t traveling.” He took the advice to heart. O’Neil put together more challenging schedules that involved ambitious travel for the O’Hara girls. He encouraged them to play high-level AAU hoops in the offseason. They took their lumps, but the Hawks became the premier girls program in Western New York, one that has won 10 of the last 11 Monsignor Martin titles and produced a dozen Division I players.
O’Neil’s epiphany was a turning point, but one of only many reasons for the stunning rise in girls basketball in the Buffalo area over the last decade or so. There was a time when it was unheard of for any local girl to play at one of the power conferences. When Geno Auriemma signed Amari DeBerry for UConn five years ago, it was the first time he recruited a Buffalo girl in nearly 30 years.
Today, there are seven products of Section VI or the Catholic league on rosters in the elite women’s college leagues:
Shay Ciezski, the 2022 Western New York player of the year for St. Mary’s of Lancaster, is the starting point guard at Indiana. DeBerry, who played sparingly at UConn, is now a fifth-year senior at Maryland. Gretchen Dolan, who like DeBerry played at Williamsville South and was 2023 player of the year, was starting at Illinois as a sophomore before hurting her knee in December.
Sydney Fenn, who played at Orchard Park before finishing her high school career in Arizona, is a redshirt freshman at Indiana. Siobhan Ryan, the career scoring leader for Sacred Heart, is a senior guard at Big East Georgetown. Clara Strack, state Class A player of the year at Hamburg two years ago, is starting at center for 11th-ranked Kentucky in the SEC, the top league in America. Kyra Wood, a City Honors grad, is a senior starting forward at Syracuse.
Next year, Lancaster’s Madison Francis, who played for the national U18 team last summer, will play at Mississippi State in the mighty SEC. Kyla Hayes, the latest star at O’Hara, will play for St. John’s in the Big East.
Evidently, the college coaches started paying attention, and it’s not likely to be a passing fad. There’s lots more exciting girls hoop talent on the horizon.
“I don’t think it’s a fluke,” said Darren Fenn, who starred at Canisius College and played professional hoops for 14 years in Europe before coming home to launch XGen Elite, a basketball facility in West Seneca that also houses the Buffalo eXtreme, a local ABA pro team (yes, he’s Sydney Fenn’s dad.)“I think it’s a confluence of a lot of factors,” Fenn said. “It’s silly to point to one particular thing that made this happen. It’s been a lot of work by a lot of different people, and there’s been a lot of investment in it. It’s been time and energy and financially investing in women’s basketball in this area. A lot of people have not gotten credit. It’s been a labor of love from a lot of different directions and I think it was a perfect storm that it all came together.”
Jim Crowley, who is back as women’s head coach at St. Bonaventure after a stint at Providence, knows what a high Division I player looks like. Crowley wasn’t at liberty to talk about individuals, but he said there could be a dozen girls from the Buffalo area playing in power leagues a few years from now.
Crowley said young girls like to see what’s possible. It had to be exciting to see a couple of local women’s college teams make dramatic runs to the Sweet 16 in years past: His Bona women did it 2012, when he was national coach of the year, and UB got to the Sweet 16 in 2018 under Legette-Jack.
“High success builds high success, too,” Crowley said. “You have kids who have gone away and done well, like Dani Haskell (a Franklinville grad who’s a senior star at Bona) or Shay (Ciezki). The young kids say, ‘Why can’t I do that?’ It’s a combination of things. They all kind of train together and play against each other. The friendly competitiveness is building, too.”
Quintin Redfern can attest to that. Redfern, a Buffalo native who grew up in Bronx and moved back to Western New York after college, is one of the top basketball trainers around. He operates Last1Best1, a facility on Bryant and Stratton Way near the intersection of Main Street and Transit in Williamsville.
Redfern is a religious man. The name Last1Best1 derives from Matthew 20:16, which says “the last shall be first, and the first last.” You never know the possibilities that lie within you, if only you believe and do the hard work. The quote was appropriate for a lot of the kids he’s trained. It could also apply to girls basketball in Buffalo, which has risen from a very low place indeed.
“It’s an every-day grind,” said Redfern, who played at Livingstone College in North Carolina and started his basketball training business about 13 years ago. “Now there’s two different crops of kids we’re working with. It’s a blessing, the next generation of talent. I’m looking at them and saying, ‘You remind me of this kid or that kid'. At that time, you don’t know what’s possible.”
Redfern, known in the hoop community as simply ‘Q’. has trained many of the best players in the area in recent years. He worked with Ciezki and Dolan, and the entire Ryan family. Siobhan is one of four siblings who made it to Division I. Her brother, Declan, was a star at Canisius High and is now at Holy Cross. Redfern is currently training Hayes and Kimora Berry of Williamsville South, who will play at Holy Cross next season. He also works with two of freshman phenom point guards: Amherst’s Lucy Giordano and St. Mary’s of Lancaster’s Mila Bissett, who is already being recruited by power five schools.
“Mila started training when she was about 8 years old,” Redfern said. “The first day, we taught her how to shoot. Her dad snuck a picture of her watching a film of the things I’m teaching her. At 8 or 9, I knew this girl had an intensity to get something different. She trains almost every single day. Her work ethic is second to none. That might be one of the highest-skilled kids I’ver ever had.
“But I paid it forward from the Shays and Gretchen Dolans and Siobhan Ryans and all those girls. They taught me how to nurture a kid and bring them up.”
One thing you can’t teach is a driving passion for the game, which many of these young females have in abundance. Grace Licata, the Amherst girls coach, marvels at the commitment of her two precocious standouts — frosh Giordano and sophomore Taryn Ashley —who led the Tigers to an improbable Section VI championship last season as a ninth seed in Class A-1.
"The two are full-on gym rats,’ said Licata, who won a state title at Williamsville South and played four years for Buffalo State. “I thought I knew the definition of a gym rat until I met them. Those girls would be in the gym all day, every day, if I let them. They are obsessed. In the offseason, we would open the gym at 6 a.m before school for them two or three days a week. I have to give them a day off. We can’t practice seven days in a row, but they’ll still text me. I’m like, ‘No, we’re not going to get in trouble, we can’t practice today’.”
As Fenn says, a confluence of factors, and a lot of determined and dedicated people, led to this revolution in girls basketball in Buffalo. It goes back, of course, to the passage of Title IX, which gave female athletes the same legal rights as males. The U.S. women’s Olympic team in 1996 spurred the founding of the WNBA. The women’s game evolved through the UConn dynasty and went to another level with the current Caitlin Clark phenomenon. Last year’s NCAA women’s title game, in which Clark’s Iowa team lost to South Carolina, demolished the men’s finale in the TV ratings. The WNBA draft was televised.
“The attention being paid to women’s basketball the last couple of years, for a variety of reasons, has been extraordinary,” Fenn said. “I’m involved in women’s basketball for the simple reason that I have daughters. It’s been a wild journey looking back on it.”
Yes, biology plays a factor. Fenn wanted more for his daughters (he has a 10th-grader who plays in Arizona). When he came back to Buffalo, he was looking for opportunities for Sydney, who was eager to play. He found out about a man named Jason Kline, who coached at St. Mary’s of Lancaster and ran a travel program called the Panthers. Like Fenn, Kline got into the women’s game because he had daughters, three of them who all played the game.
“Jason had built a strong foundation of young women in this area who wanted to play basketball,” Fenn said. “He was giving them a ton of court time, and doing some high-level stuff with them I don’t think was being done before. You look back at some of those teams, the amount of talent that in that gym at St. Mary’s was incredible. These kids were 10 or 11. You had Shay Ciezki, Mattie Francis, Sydney (Fenn), Clara Strack, Kaylee Kryzstof (who played at Depew and is now at Binghamton). I think a lot of this happened from people who got invested in women’s hoops because they had daughters or sisters or whoever and wanted more than what was available at the time.”
Kline resigned as St. Mary’s coach five years ago. Fenn, who had been director of basketball at St. Mary’s and coached Nichols for a year, took over the Panthers program. That was around the time he bought an old floor hockey barn in West Seneca and converted it into XGen Elite, a basketball facility that has become one of the top resources for AAU basketball in the entire state.
Training is vital, along with family support and a love for the game and basic physical gifts. But as Nick O’Neil learned a decade ago, exposure could be the biggest factor of all. When the top coaches didn’t see Buffalo kids on the travel circuit, it was easy to ignore them. It’s like a tree falling in the woods. Fenn said you can have the best game of your life, but it’s pointless if no one sees it.
“At the time, if you wanted to play high-level exposure basketball, which is the AAU season in spring and summer, you had to leave the area,” Fenn said.
Girls went to Syracuse to get exposure on the AAU circuit. Others traveled to New York City or Philadelphia. DeBerry, the first Buffalo gal in ages to get recruited at a national level, played for the Philadelphia Belles. But Buffalo had no team presence at the big events, where the top coaches recruit.
Fenn is now working with Team Northeast, which trains girls from Syracuse, Rochester and Albany, and they create travel teams for the prestigious AAU circuit. Fenn said the effort is formulated at XGen. He said there could be seven or eight teams on the road this spring and summer, with players ranging from eighth grade up to the 17U level. They will compete before Division I coaches at the NCAA’s “live” exposure tournaments in venues as far away as Louisville, Kentucky.
“There’s a live event in April, in May and a lot of live events in July,” Fenn explained. “They’re called live because that’s when Division I schools can come and watch. The labor is first enough to get teams that are first good enough to go out there and compete — because you’re playing teams from all over the country in some of them — and the next part is keeping your talent.”
Jen Banker is head coach at Daemen University, the top Division II basketball school in the state. Daemen’s men are unbeaten overall and both the men and women are unbeaten in the ECC. Banker’s women have won the last four conference titles, profiting from the rise in young talent in Western New York and the rise in AAU programs like XGen and I-90 Elite.
“You find a niche,” Banker said. “What’s happening now is, yeah, there’s good players so other coaches are saying, ‘What’s going on there?’ Now other coaches are going to look at Buffalo because of those players. When an area is putting out talent like that, absolutely other coaches are going to look at that area. It made my job much more difficult. At one time, a lot of the local coaches weren’t recruiting players from this area. That has changed, but there were some really good players here before, but they weren’t getting recruited by the local Division I schools, and that has changed.”
Boy, has it changed. There’s so much talent in Section VI these days, it’s hard to keep up. Redfern said there’s young Division I prospects in his gym that no one knows about. Crowley can’t speak publicly due to NCAA rules, but you know there are at least half a dozen young girls he’d be happy to bring to Olean to help the resurgence of his Bona program.
Word is, Celsy Columbo, a 6-3 sophomore at Pioneer, has been offered by Illinois. Columbo had 30 points, 13 rebounds and 10 blocks in a loss to Amherst. Randolph sophomore Skylar Herington, who led her school to a state final as an eighth-grader, could be a high DI player. Molly Mescall, who is averaging 25 points a game for Iroquois, will play at Canisius next season. Her teammate Kendall Hulsman, is a 6-4 sophomore who averages 20 points, 15 rebounds and five blocks a game. North Tonawanda junior Annabelle Day averages 25 points a game; her sister, Lily, is putting in 20 points a game and could be an even bigger prospect.
The nation’s top college coaches are well aware. So are the mid-major Division I people. After decades of near-irrelevance, Buffalo has become a significant player in women’s basketball. O’Neil can vouch for that. Last season, three of his former O’Hara players — Aaliyah Parker, Angel Parker and Amelia Strong — were the top three scorers on a Niagara University team that won 21 games, reached the MAAC final and won a game in the women’s NIT.
“Now all the MAAC coaches call me, from both conferences,” O’Neil said. “It’s ‘Where do we go, who should we be looking at?'. It’s amazing, the change. I was begging people to look at these kids. Now they call me every day, and we’ve got more coming through the pipeline. The girls are way ahead of the boys, and it’s crazy. I never thought it would be the case, but it is, by far.”O’Hara and St. Mary’s both participated in the Best of Michigan tournament in Detroit in mid-December. O’Neil said the baseline was lined with coaches from such college programs as Michigan, Michigan. State, Ohio State, Indiana and Eastern Michigan. He said the Big Ten schools were recruiting Bissett in a big way, and he predicted she will sign with a power five school this summer.
“I would never in my wildest dreams see schools calling me and talking about NIL for girls,” O’Neil said. “Giving girls money and asking, ‘Hey, what’s that other school giving her? We can do better than that’.”
Yes, basketball is big business, and the Buffalo gals are in the game, too. Everyone interviewed for this story said it’s bound to keep growing, that the wave will continue and there will be even more Western New York players heading for the power conferences — and maybe some day soon, the WNBA.
“All it takes is for girls to fall in love with the sport and to genuinely want to be better,” Licata said. “That’s something I honestly wish I had as a player. I didn’t love it as much as these girls do. To see their obsession — I’m thinking of the two on my team, but there’s a bunch around WNY just like them. They’re obsessed, they love it, and that’s what it takes, right? The love and the drive and the need to be better, the competitor in them. I definitely think girls around the area will continue to push themselves and each other to achieve that next level.” Fenn, who was an all-league post player at Canisius and expanded his game out to the perimeter over a 14-year pro career, knows how much is possible if you’re dedicated to the game.
“Looking down the line at ‘the babies’, as we call them, the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders coming up as well as the young kids playing now, Western New York basketball is going to be in good hands for awhile,” Fenn said.
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