THE GAZETTE
Wednesday, December 18, 2013 r
BLAKE
Continued from Page B-1 for Aidan’s first two seasons, he was in the arena. He felt the sting of every loss. And it just so happened that the first game he played for Blake — and first game with his brother at the high school level — was that historic win. Now, the pair has the opportunity to play on the same team for a second season and lead the Bengals to what could be their most memorable year yet. “The whole team has de-
cided that we’re really going to stop the losing and turn a new page and build a winning program,” Sage said. “This year we have a lot of seniors and that guidance from the veterans has really helped out.” Aidan, a captain this season, sets the tone for the team with his work ethic on the ice sheet. He’s constantly winning battles for loose pucks and digging in the corners. It’s an attribute of his game that Drzewicki admires greatly. “I’ll call Aidan the whirling dervish because he never stops,” Drzewicki said. “He just plays so
hard and he’s so rugged. He’s got a high motor. He’s more of a two-way player and his brother is a pure offensive machine.” Sage, as Drzewicki alluded to, is a pure scorer with a wicked right-handed shot. As of Monday night, he led the Montgomery County 1A league in points with nine goals and five assists. Of his nine goals, three were of the shorthanded variety as the speedster, who also plays for Team Maryland, can glide in open ice with the best of them. “My game is speed,” Sage said. “There’s a lot more open space and I love penalty killing. It
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works with my style. It takes the other team by surprise when I rush the puck up a little bit more. “As you grow older you realize what your strengths are and where you can both make the most difference on the ice.” Of course, as is likely the case with any sibling relationship, the desire to succeed not only stems from wanting to win as many games as possible, but from wanting to out-perform the other brother. “I think it’s a good bonding experience and it’s pretty good to push each other, too,” Aidan said. “I know I don’t want my
little brother to be playing better than me and he probably wants to show me up.” Said Sage: “We kind of feed off of each other. When he’s there I usually play a lot better because I always want to do better than he does.” So far, both have done a remarkable job and it has Blake, a team that still only has two full lines and a roster of 14 players, in position to turn in an historic season if they keep at the current pace. “I think our kids are having a good time,” Drzewicki said. “I hope that we will win more than
BULLIS
Continued from Page B-1 ally known for lighting up scoreboards — though he certainly could — rather setting up teammates to do exactly that. Aaron Briggs, this year’s de facto point guard, has much the same ball control as Thompson, but he’s not afraid to let it fly either. “I mean, I’d want to say me,” Briggs said when asked who the best shooter on the team is. “But the thing is, it could be somebody new every night. Yesterday it was Jamaal (Greenwood) and today it was probably me.” Nobody would be able to fault Briggs for labeling himself as the team’s most dangerous 3-point-shot threat. He made 20 3-pointers in the Bulldogs’ first seven games, hitting at least two in each. The next closest is Greenwood, a senior in his second year at Bullis, who has made 12 and is tied with Briggs as the team’s leading scorer with 13.4 points per game. “We probably shoot 30 to 35 threes per game,” Briggs said. “We’re focused on driving and kicking because we have a lot of shooters this year. We’re a 3-point shooting team.” But what happens when a team like that goes cold? Shots from 20-25 feet are far less likely to go in than a layup or a dump in the lane. “We just pick up the press on ‘D,’” the guard said. “We’ll play a full court press and get points on the other end, get and-ones, easy layups.” Of course, with four marksmen — Briggs, Greenwood, Russell Sangster and Brian Kelley, Bruce’s son — deco-
GREG DOHLER/THE GAZETTE
Russell Sangster (left) of Bullis School passes the ball in a game against visiting Springside Chestnut Hill Academy Friday in Potomac. rating the perimeter at all times, it’s unusual for all of them to go cold at once. Seven different players have made a 3-pointer thus far, and five from that crew have made more than six, which averages out to nearly one per game from at least five players.
LEDECKY
Continued from Page B-1 said. “You can be on the outside looking in and think maybe [her life] isn’t normal, but this is her world and it’s just normal to her.” As a seemingly permanent fixture on Team USA, at least for the foreseeable future, Ledecky has become a world traveler. She was in Barcelona, Spain just before the start of school for the world championships and is off to Glasgow, Scotland this week to represent the United States against a compilation of some of the top Europeans in the Duel in the Pool. But after every trip oversees, every gold medal, every prestigious award and every television appearance, Ledecky returns home and gives just as much of herself to her peers, her Stone Ridge teammates. There was never any question she would, Ledecky said. After all, she, at the root of it all, is just a high school junior who wants to compete on a team with her friends and classmates and represent her school in the best way possible. In 2012-13, she led Stone Ridge to its first Independent School League title since 2003 and fourth place at the Washington Metropolitan Interscholastic Swimming
SISTERS
Continued from Page B-1 older children while on the Maryland Titans Track Club. She wasn’t great when she first started, she said. “I kind of had a disadvantage of always having to run up,” Pyles said. But she kept with it and has developed into a talented and versatile runner. She said the experience with the Titans helped her mentally prepare for her freshman season with Clarksburg. “It gave me practice to run with girls who are more experienced and have been doing it longer,” she said. Now, she is thriving in multiple events while competing against older competition. “She learns very quickly,” Clarksburg coach Scott Mathias said. “She takes it all in, it doesn’t go in one ear and out the other like it does with some kids.”
FILE PHOTO
Stone Ridge School for the Sacred Heart junior Katie Ledecky.
and Diving Championship, the Gators’ best showing in recent years and quite an accomplishment for one of the field’s smaller teams. Ledecky said she is hopeful the team can achieve equal or better results this winter. “[Her commitment to the Stone Ridge team] just shows how grounded she is, it shows her character and the type of person that she is,” Walker said. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what happened to Ledecky in the summer of 2012, but that Olympic gold was just the beginning of what has been a spectacular two years in her blossoming swimming career — it seems like
Alexus and her sisters were connected to Clarkburg’s track and field program long before they were officially part of the program. Their mother, Rhoshanda Pyles, Clarkburg’s assistant principal, would take her three young daughters to watch the team practice, Mathias said. In spite of Alexus’ training and background, her stellar freshman season came as a bit of a surprise, Mathias said. As a freshman, she was selected to the All-Gazette second team for the 100-meter hurdles in the spring and the 55-meter hurdles in the indoor season. “I knew that she was talented and I knew she had the opportunity to be good,” Mathias said. “But I think she achieved at a higher level than anybody could have expected, really.” It’s hard for anybody to match Pyles’ first-year achievements. Brionne, though, has shown promise so far in the hurdle events. On Saturday, the siblings
Sangster foresaw this change in style coming before Kelley had to say anything. He knew Thompson would be gone, Briggs would be stepping in, his scoring would be concentrated from the perimeter and the shots would be flying. “It was comforting knowing we had
she breaks a new record every time she competes these days. This summer, she won four gold medals at the 2013 FINA World Championships in Spain, setting world records in the 800-meter freestyle and 1,500-meter freestyle (by more than six seconds) and an American record in the 400-meter freestyle. Her results earned her the FINA Trophy for the highest scoring woman in the competition. At the 2013 AT&T Nationals earlier this month, she broke the American mark in the 1,650yard freestyle by nine seconds, won the 500-yard freestyle and finished runner-up to Missy Franklin in the 200-yard freestyle. “I think [my breakout] was just an accumulation of a number of things,” Ledecky said. “It’s been a lot of hard training. My coach [Bruce Gemmell] this past year has been great, I have a great training group made up of mostly juniors and seniors from the area that push me every day. After London, I increased my dry land and had a more structured dry land program [that is geared toward flexibility and strength, not weight lifting] that really helped my strength.” Ledecky said her success hasn’t resulted in any added pressure, though her rapid improvements do become harder teamed up with Brionna Palmer and Taliah Hardie to place ninth in the 800-meter relay. Rhoshanda said watching her daughters compete can be “very nerve-racking.” “We hope the best for all of them and we want them to do their best,” she said. The third sister, Cierra, is in eighth grade. She too takes part in the family workouts led by their father, Terrance Pyles, and may join her older sisters on the team next season. “It’s definitely been a journey for the entire family,” Rhoshanda said. Long term, Alexus said she wants that journey to result in a full-ride scholarship to a Division I college. As for now, she is hoping the Pyles sisters can pull off a top-two finish this season. “Anything’s possible. I’m hoping that if we both work hard, we can take one and two,” Alexus said. egoldwein@gazette.net
[Thompson] because he was going to make the right decision every time,” said Sangster, who has made eight 3-pointers and is third on the team with 10.8 points per game. “But we’re all shooters. We can all score. Sometimes we can go on 15-0 runs, 20-0 runs. Ev-
to top. Every record she has set serves as motivation to continue dropping time and finding new ways to get better, Ledecky said. It seems unlikely that anyone will beat Ledecky in high school competition but there doesn’t seem to be any bitterness from area swimmers. Sure, everyone wants to win races, but the opportunity to share the pool
the four games we won last year. But we don’t win games unless we are playing perfectly.” Even after practice on the ice, the Bittinger-Esser’s naturally spend plenty of time playing on their street as well, constantly trying to one-up each other. But they’ve also got a younger brother, Quinn, who’s 12. He plays hockey too. “Sometimes we got outside and shoot around,” Sage said. “But it’s always me and Aidan against Quinn. You’ve got to beat up on your little brother.” ncammarota@gazette.net
erybody on the court is a lot quicker. We create a lot of matchup problems. It’s a fun time to be on the court.” Fun is exactly how Kelley branded his team. “It’s a fun style of basketball,” he said. “You’d enjoy watching it. There’s a lot of action.” Of Bullis’ first seven wins, five have come by more than 20 points and the Bulldogs have eclipsed 60 in every game but one, a 48-46 victory over Westtown (Pa.). In their lone loss, to Genesis Academy, Bullis still put up more than 70 and were within a 3-pointer of a perfect 7-0 start. “I see this team being very dangerous,” Briggs said. “Last year we started out 4-3 in the first seven games. This year we’re already 6-1.” Of course, this gun-slinging bunch is aided by the 6-foot-10, Hofstra-bound presence inside in Andre Walker. He essentially single-handedly ensures defenses won’t resort to 3-2 zones, which limit open looks from beyond the arc, but leave the post open and vulnerable. Said Kelley: “We can beat teams multiple different ways.” But he’s not impressed — not yet. Per usual, he’ll take his team down south for the holidays — Myrtle Beach is the destination this year as compared to Miami last year — where they will match up with some of the best competition on the East Coast. Then comes the heart of the Interstate Athletic Conference schedule, where Bullis will be tested. “We’re not great, we’re good,” the coach said. “But it’s a fun brand of basketball to coach.” tmewhirter@gazette.net
with one of the world’s greatest swimmers is one Washington, D.C.-area high school swimmers seem to have embraced. Maybe it’s because this region is used to international-level talent, Walker said. Or maybe it’s because despite Ledecky’s rising star, she is still just the Katie they grew up training with. “You want people like that
there, you don’t want to push those people away,” Walker said. “You get to say Katie Ledecky swam at Metros and no one else gets to say that. I don’t see the negativity at all. We are all talking about the same thing, she is bringing swimming into the picture.” jbeekman@gazette.net