The Wachusett girls basketball team, by rule, begins road trips with a silent bus ride to focus on the upcoming opponent.
Recently, a new tradition has highlighted buses home: the postgame rap.
It started last winter and evolved with this year’s team. Junior Ruth Marcel writes the verses, which recount the big moments and themes from the game. Sophomore Teegan Lanpher starts the rap before the rest of the Mountaineers join in.
“Teegan’s good,” star junior forward Jae Scott said. “She's only messed up once out of all those raps.”
The renditions carried all throughout the Mountaineers’ historic season, right up to the final bus home from their first Division 1 championship. As the players rapped about Scott’s winning layup with three seconds left, securing a state title and getting revenge against Bishop Feehan in a championship rematch, 19th-year head coach Jim Oxford saw the power of the young, fun-loving group he says has changed him.
“I just learned a big thing about coaching this season,” Oxford said. “The really, really important part of coaching is truly, fully, 100-percent understanding your team and how they're wired, and how you have to work with their wiring, not try to rewire them. You’ve got to just work with who they are because that's who they are.”
Wachusett (24-1) was not supposed to contend for a championship. The program had gone 68-5 the previous three years, making the Final Four twice before its first state final appearance ended in heartbreak last season. The undefeated Mountaineers, with seven seniors, were stunned by Bishop Feehan. It’s a loss Sophie Gibbons still gets emotional about and one of Oxford’s hardest experiences ever as a coach.
Only three players — Scott, Gibbons and Lanpher — returned from last season’s team. By all accounts, the first tryouts were ugly. Wachusett runs a “Kansas” drill every practice, which requires the team to run full-court as trios and make as many shots as possible in four minutes.
At the end of last season, the program high was 125 makes. They started with 65 during this winter’s tryouts.
Championship goals are second-nature at Wachusett. Oxford said that for the first time in 19 years, he thought about taking those goals off the table.
“As we started to go through drills, it became so obvious that there's just no institutional knowledge of how we do this,” he said. “We're explaining drills. We are amazed at what kids couldn't do when in previous years, they knew exactly what to do. It was just eye-opening.”
Oxford started from scratch with Wachusett’s offense, moving from a high-powered, perimeter-oriented attack from last season to a simple, paint-focused style that leaned on Scott and freshman center Kyla Yurkus. Scott, the lone returning starter and a wing last season, needed to adapt her game and dominate out of the post while outgrowing her shy self.
“It was kind of hard at first, but I feel like I changed as a player, and it helped,” Scott said. “It was cool to learn to be down on the post, because now I know more stuff that I can do.”
Gibbons (a junior) and Lanpher are younger sisters of Wachusett legends Mary Gibbons, a member of last year’s squad who just wrapped her freshman season at Navy, and Belle Lanpher, the NEC Player of the Year at Central Connecticut State. Now it was their turn to carry the torch in the backcourt.
Oxford started to feel hopeful as the season went along. Gibbons quickly developed a reputation as a smart point guard who rarely turned the ball over. Lanpher, a generous 5-foot-3, hounded opponents on defense and fearlessly charged to the basket. Yurkus dramatically exceeded expectations as a legitimate impact player in her first year, and Scott routinely tallied 20-point double-doubles.
But strangely, Oxford noticed that as the wins stacked up (Wachusett would lose once all winter to New Hampshire superpower Bedford) his young team stayed focused but fun. Lanpher remembers one practice where Oxford came in dressed nicely — except for his Crocs, which drew teasing from the team. Oxford is not a loud, intense coach, but he’s stern and serious, and he was caught off-guard by his players.
“We all have very bubbly personalities, I would say, and very joking personalities,” Gibbons said. “I think we definitely rubbed off on him a bit. I don't know how much he wants to admit it, but he laughs at us a lot.”
As the playoffs arrived, Oxford voiced concerns to assistant Rusty Dillon that his squad didn’t understand the stakes of single-elimination games. Wachusett nearly lost twice to Central Catholic, first in the Board 27 Comcast Tournament in February and then in the Division 1 quarterfinals, but survived. The Mountaineers won a defensive slugfest against Braintree in the semis to set the stage for a Bishop Feehan rematch. Their attitude was unfazed.
“I went into that game Saturday extremely confident in my team because they were so confident,” Oxford said. “And that was just a great feeling, to not have the anxiety of that kind of a game, but to be so relaxed because I was so confident in my players.”
The confidence translated in a 55-54 thriller. Scott gave one of the best individual performances in state tournament history with 31 points, 14 rebounds and the game-winning layup. But others stepped up too, including Lanpher, who hit huge 3s and driving scores as part of her 13 points.
“Just like the energy on the floor — you could tell that everybody was hyped,” she said. “We're close, and this was our final, last step to getting what we've really worked for this whole season.”
After the victory, Gibbons came up to Oxford with another jest: “Who’s your favorite Gibbons now?” It was a small moment in a postgame jubilation they’ll both cherish.
Oxford, for 19 years, had only known seasons to end with tears in the locker room, having come so close so many times. Gibbons, from watching her sister and playing herself, associated winning with more practice and losing with the end.
“I'm so used to ending the season so sad, and that's kind of my cue to be like, ‘Oh, it's done. We were crying, so it's done’ — crying because it's over,” she said. “But now it was just like — I'm happy, but oh my gosh, junior year’s done.”
