This is Part 1 of a three-part series on the state of Boston City League girls basketball. You can read Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.
It's Feb. 20, the heart of winter vacation, and O'Bryant has just claimed the Boston City League girls basketball championship.
With a DJ on the right baseline corner and local TV cameras roaming the sidelines of Madison Park Vocational High, O'Bryant players leaped and cheered to celebrate their first City League title in more than a decade.
Across the court, the Snowden Cougars watched, holding back tears.
Snowden International, a tiny high school of about 420 students located in downtown Boston, went 19-0 to reach the city championship game. The Cougars barely stayed afloat with a roster of six girls – an improvement from the last two seasons of five-girl teams.
Cougars coach Phibe Pham patiently led her squad through the loss. Pham is a proud 2007 Snowden graduate who went on to play in college at Pine Manor. She's coached the Cougars for nine seasons, and Pham relishes seeing the year-over-year progress of her girls. She smiles at the history this team made by reaching the City League championship game.
But she also faces an honest truth. The girls basketball teams in the Boston City League — which comprises all but one of the public high schools in the city of Boston — cannot compete at a state-wide level anymore, a combination of too few players to sustain most programs and a general lack of varsity-caliber talent.
"We're losing a lot of skills," Pham said. “I feel like when I was playing, there was a ton of skill, plenty of players, and every school had two (teams), a JV and a varsity, because there were so many girls who were so interested in playing ball. But now it's hard to even pull girls to play on a varsity team. And most girls who do play on varsity team aren't even varsity level — they're more on the JV level."
That's a feeling many of the folks in the Boston City League know well. Over the last decade-plus, its 15 schools have collectively been on a slow, subtle slide and have plummeted since the pandemic. It's even more stark in comparison to the sustained success of the boys teams. In the four years since the MIAA switched to the statewide tournament format, two Boston City League boys teams have won state titles. Six others have reached a state quarterfinal at least once.
In that same span, no Boston City League girls team has advanced past the Round of 32.
This winter, 11 City League boys teams qualified for the state tournament based on their overall MIAA power rating results (excluding the rule that teams .500 or better earn auto-bids). Two girls programs, New Mission and Snowden, qualified on team strength. City League champion O'Bryant used an auto-bid as a No. 34 seed.
It's not that Boston can't develop talent. Taina Mair (Dorchester, Mass.) is the starting point guard at Duke, a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament. Christina Pham (South Boston, Mass.) just won Massachusetts Gatorade Player of the Year at Nobles. Even in the MIAA, Cathedral, a private, Catholic school located in Boston's South End, has won seven state championships in the last 10 years — playing with many Boston natives. Some of the most well-respected coaches in the state, like Boo Rice (Fenway) and Trudy Fisher (O'Bryant), worked in the city.
But there are not enough interested girls, let alone experienced basketball players, to sustain even one successful public high school program out of the dozens in the Boston City League.
What's causing the downward spiral?
Molly McDonough, a physical education teacher at Brighton High, is in her first year as the girls basketball head coach — the Bengals' fourth in the last four seasons. She graduated from Milton High in 2013 and played varsity basketball at the suburban high school with a well-developed program.
On Brighton's nine-girl roster, one member never played basketball before this season and three had never played before they started high school. There is no JV or freshman team. McDonough had to adjust her expectations of the varsity squad.
"When I got to my high school team, the expectation is that we all knew the basic skills, and the dribbling and shooting and that kind of stuff," she said. "So at practice, it's sometimes tough because everyone's at a different skill level. There's not a flow to practice because I do have to sometimes take a few girls to the side and teach them certain things, like a layup or how to shoot properly, whereas at Milton High I was taught that at a younger age."
It wasn’t always this way. Shantell Jeter, BPS Manager of Special Projects, played at Brighton in the mid-2000s, when City League teams regularly competed for state titles. Jeter recalls facing off against players like Shaleyse Smallwood, O'Bryant's current head coach and a Tigers alum who would become a 1,000-point scorer in college at Northeastern.
Jeter now coaches just outside of Boston at Belmont High, where in contrast to Brighton, she had 45 girls try out. Even though she works in the city schools, Jeter never wanted the Brighton job.
"People will probably be mad about this, but again, I think, just with what's been going on in recent years, it just didn't seem or feel very promising," she said.
Courtney Leonard is the athletic coordinator at Henderson Inclusion School (formerly Tech Boston), a BPS school that won the City League girls championship two years ago but has faded since. She grew up in Mattapan in the late 1990s and went to high school in Newton as part of the city's METCO education program. Leonard reminisces about the arguable heyday of local Boston hoops, when the Boston Neighborhood Basketball League (BNBL) was booming for both boys and girls.
"Girls basketball was crazy," she said. "There were so many dope players during that time, and that therefore transitioned and translated into the high school ball."
Burke (now Holland) won a girls Division 3 state championship in 1999; they did not field a varsity team this season. New Mission captured the Division 4 title in 2007. Fenway, led by Rice, won in 2012 and 2013.
But slowly the tide started to shift. Fewer schools remained relevant at a statewide level, with Fenway carrying the torch through the end of the 2010s. The last great teams were led by Rice and star wing Kayana Armbrister, who now plays Division 1 college ball at UT Martin. Following the pandemic-altered 2020-21 season, Armbrister transferred to Dexter Southfield.
New Mission, Boston Latin Academy and O'Bryant have the most consistently well-stocked programs. Latin Academy, coached by Greg Berry, has enough numbers for a varsity and JV team. But he'll often play schools with tiny rotations. Some programs are caught in the middle with too few players for a JV team, forcing them up to varsity and a level of basketball they're not ready for.
"I feel bad for those schools. I really do," Berry said. "It's unfair that you're asking girls that want to develop, and you want them to play at the junior varsity level, to now have to go play in a varsity game that might be a little bit more competitive."
The best inner-city girls players rarely stay in Boston Public Schools. They either transfer to Cathedral or a prep school finds them. Snowden's freshman phenom, Jenalis Mercado, dropped 41 points in the city tournament semifinals and 27 in the championship loss. Pham already expects her to transfer.
"I believe there's a couple of coaches already talking to (Mercado), and I had a heads up, like, 'Oh, she might not come back next year,' which sucks," Pham said.
Some coaches attribute a pivot point for the change to the rise in prep school interest compounded with club basketball/AAU's takeover, which began in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Suddenly many of the city's best players were leaving Boston Public Schools and those neighborhood leagues.
"At that point, I started to see the decline," said Berry, who has coached in and around the city for 24 years. "I was also seeing that the resources weren't there anymore. Because of kids leaving and going to other schools outside of the city, it means that the downward spiral of talent was starting to come up."
Playing club basketball often requires significant financial backing, yet the vast majority of high-level high school players participate. That's a difficult ask for many families who attend Boston City League schools who might not have the financial means.
"The way that it's separated or filtered out kids, and especially in girls sports, I think, is that financial piece," Leonard said. "If you don't have the dollars and cents of that AAU market, parents, just in the summer, you could be spending $10,000 trying to keep up with your kids."
Club basketball also commands time, and though there are Boston-based teams like the Showstoppers, most of the top AAU programs in Massachusetts play in the suburbs. That means athletes must leave the city to play, even in the offseason.
"What if she's the captain and she wants to hold a captain's activity with just the team?" Berry said. "What if she plays another sport for her high school? That AAU commitment takes away from that and then, unfortunately, that kid now is left to choose."
But these club hurdles also apply on the boys side. So why is there such a large gap?
The coaches who spoke for this story felt that the facilities and equipment available at schools were generally on par with the boys teams. However, nearly all of the coaches interviewed zeroed in on a common belief: Boston doesn't advertise enough basketball to young girls.
Jeter and Leonard praised their formative upbringings at local community centers and in the BNBL. But the BNBL is no longer the who's-who meetup of Boston's stars. Some girls-oriented leagues exist; SISRun is a popular one that came out of the pandemic. But coaches believe the options were limited, and as inner-city community centers became less popular, fewer camps replaced that outlet for girls.
"I think that a lot of the times, BPS, or just kind of any sports organization, usually gears the focus towards the boys, and I don't think gives enough opportunities to girls at a young age to play basketball and get them interested," McDonough said. "So I think a lot of the time, girls will try in middle school or at the start of high school, but at that point, sometimes it's too late, just because the basic skills aren't there. Whereas they are catching boys, per se, at a younger age and doing skills (sessions) and tournaments and that kind of stuff. I don't think they're giving the girls the same opportunity."
The coaches also raised an additional factor: Boston Public Schools itself has changed over the years. Neighborhood schools like Dorchester High, South Boston High and West Roxbury High closed in the mid-2000s as part of sweeping mergers. Boston uses a tiered school-choice application system to place students into high schools. It means students attending schools like Brighton High or Snowden are often from other neighborhoods.
"I think also that's a reason why sometimes it's more difficult for Boston, because there isn't that sense of community within the school there is in the suburbs," McDonough said. "Like in Milton, we played together our whole lives, if we were in elementary up to high school, with girls the same age, and you might not have that in BPS."
Getting to and from a practice or game can range from inconvenient to unsafe, especially when they end in the pitch dark during winter.
Pham explained that at Snowden, which doesn't have its own gym, practices take place either at McKinley Elementary in the South End or Orchard Gardens in Roxbury. Yet players live in East Boston, Dorchester and Mattapan. With practices getting out as late as 7 p.m., that's a long commute home, likely on public transit. Snowden also doesn't charter a bus to and from most games. Unlike in the suburbs, where chartered buses are second-nature, the entire city of Boston faces a school bus shortage.
BPS chief of students Cory McCarthy coached the New Mission girls to their 2007 state title. McCarthy vividly recalls his first game in 2003. After playing Somerville, he and his team went as a group on the MBTA buses to drop every girl off at home, one by one. McCarthy said he finished around 1 a.m.
"I'll never forget how cold — to this day, I've never been that cold," he said.
And finally, these players and coaches have to battle the underlying rhetoric that girls basketball — even as it catches fire professionally and collegiately — is viewed as secondary in Boston.
Just look at the City League championship crowds. This year, the girls game took place before the boys, and drew, at most, 100 spectators at tip-off. But the audience grew as the game progressed, likely in anticipation of the ensuing boys matchup, and by the time that game tipped off, the crowd total appeared to have nearly doubled.
From McCarthy's perspective, the city-wide talent struggle breeds apathy, which feeds the spiral. Until the girls teams start winning outside of Boston, it'll be hard for those in the city to notice.
