By Sunayana Prabhu
SHREWSBURY – With strength, talent, resilience and hope, the Shrewsbury Borough School (SBS) girls’ basketball team redeemed a seemingly lost season and emerged triumphant.
The team was honored at the borough council meeting Tuesday, March 12, for winning the Coastal Intermediate Basketball League Championship over an unbeaten Fair Haven team at Knollwood Elementary School March 1.
What makes this win so special is how the team rallied following a near season-ending event: the arrest and termination of their coach just two months ago.
But two SBS middle school educators – math teacher Jean Scully and science teacher Kristin Tardiff – stepped up to coach the 15 girls from grades 6 to 8 for the remainder of the season, which played out “pretty much (like) a script from a movie, with that Hollywood ending,” said Ali Peduto, parent of eighth grader Skylar Peduto, a team member, in a social media post with almost a hundred positive comments.
“The last 10 seconds of that (final) game were completely electric,” Tardiff said, with Scully on a phone call with The Two River Times. “It was like magic.”
Two months ago, SBS terminated the team’s former basketball coach Thomas Carraher, 26, also a teacher at Mahala F. Atchison Elementary School in Tinton Falls, after the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office (MCPO) arrested and charged him with criminal sexual contact with a minor via an online social media app.
Although the MCPO made clear to both school districts and the media that there was no indication the charges related directly to any student or student-athlete at either SBS or Atchison, the girls faced a barrage of negativity, Peduto said.
After their coach’s arrest, the girls “got put through the wringer with peers,” she said, noting the weekend after the news broke, “the boys were teasing them, the kids from other towns were texting them.”
Tardiff said she and Scully helped the girls use their anger over the circumstances as fuel, not only to march ahead and win, but to overcome any fear and uncertainty resulting from the situation.
When Scully and Tardiff met the girls for the first time in January, “the situation was definitely weighing heavily on their mind,” Scully said, remembering how quiet the girls were. They “did not have the words in their vocabulary or in their experience, to put words to their feelings,” she said.
In terms of strategizing a game plan, Scully and Tardiff said they realized they “couldn’t completely rip everything from them and start brand new.”
Coaching middle school girls is a “roller coaster,” Scully said. “You can say one thing to them one day and it may fire them up and help them to find an aggressive player within them. Then you could say the very same thing the next day and somebody might cry.”
The new coaches pushed the girls to challenge their limits but also knew when to step back.
At the last practice before the championship, they spoke to the girls about everything they had been working on all year: “making layups, playing defense, moving on offense,” Tardiff said.
But the girls were “just not themselves,” she said. “It was like there was a lot of pressure weighing on their shoulders.”
So the coaches decided to diffuse some tension by playing Steal The Bacon, a lighthearted game “that involves a lot of laughing – exactly what we all needed at that time,” Tardiff said.
Scully also reminded the team of their biggest advantage over their opponents: “We went in with absolutely nothing to lose. We were the lower-ranked team.”
And they turned a clearly hopeless situation into a classic underdog win.
Shooting, dribbling, defending, rebounding and passing are some of the fundamentals of basketball the girls showcased but the team unanimously agreed that one of the most valuable skills they learned that won them the championship was determination.
“We were so low in our season that getting back to the top was a struggle, but we persevered and we got there,” said eighth grader and team member P.J. Galligan.
“There are people who doubted us. It is exciting to know that we beat them,” added teammate Bella Jackson.
From feeling “shocked” and “nervous” without a coach, teammate Casey Miranda said she was “even more motivated” when Scully and Tardiff took over. “I feel you can come back from anything if you put in a 110%,” Casey said.
“We went through many hard- ships throughout our season and we came out on top and I’m very proud” of what we accomplished, added Skylar Peduto.
During the course of two months, Scully told the girls something that might resonate with many beyond sports: “It’s OK for girls to be competitive. It’s OK for girls to want to win.”
The article originally appeared in the March 14 –March 20, 2024 print edition of The Two River Times.
