On Friday night, former Oliver Ames star Lauren Battista will look to cap her record-setting, four-year career at Bentley University with a victory in the NCAA Division II championship game against West Texas A&M (32-2) in Erie, Pa. The No. 1 ranked Falcons (34-0) are looking to complete an historic undefeated season and claim the program’s first national title.
According to Battista’s former coach, this is exactly what was hoped for when she made the decision to forgo opportunities to play DI and join the Falcons.
“She just had to go someplace that she knew in her heart that she would have the chance to play for a national championship,” said OA coach Laney Clement-Holbrook about Battista’s college decision.
“I told her, ‘You’re not going to be satisfied going to a school that just makes it to the Big Dance. You want to be the Big Dance.’ She had chances to go DI but this was such a perfect fit and she wanted the chance to play for a national championship,” added Clement-Holbrook.
In the past four years, Battista has earned three All-American nods and has become Bentley’s all-time leading scorer with 2,098 points. She is currently a nominee for WBCA Division II Player of the Year and has compiled an impressive 123-11 record over her career.
None of this is a surprise to Clement-Holbrook.
“She has the most incredible work ethic of any athlete that I’ve had the pleasure to coach,” she said. “One of the things that I love about her - it’s never about her. She’s the most unselfish player because she wants to make her teammates better and I think over the course of her four years that truly is the legacy.”
Clement-Holbrook continued, “I think that the influence that she had and the respect that she had from her teammates, she would say, ‘Jump on my back girls; we’re going to do this.’ It was always unspoken - she led by example, but her teammates truly understood that everyone had a role…[and] because they trusted her would do anything to make it happen.”
In 2006, Oliver Ames won its first ever state title and, according to Clement-Holbrook, that was the day that Battista and the class of 2010 set it as a goal to achieve the same feat.
“I still have pictures of them sitting behind the bench at the Boston Garden watching. They were sitting together with their little Easton basketball sweatshirts on like kids in a candy store and they kept saying to themselves, ‘This is going to be us. We’re going to do this.’ How nice is it to set a goal and then actually get to achieve it?”
After capping her senior season with a Division II state championship, Battista now has the same opportunity to finish her college career with a victory.
The connection that the high school coach had with her star player has continued throughout out her years in college, which has been helped by the fact that Bentley is coached by Clement-Holbrook’s former college teammate and roommate Barbara Stevens.
“It was just such a natural fit for me to be able to touch base with her and check in and, you know, we’ve been able to maintain that relationship through college.”
She highlighted a special moment that underscored both the bond between Battista and her former program as well as her generosity. After playing a game against CW Post on a Saturday afternoon in Long Island, Battista took the bus ride home to Waltham with her Bentley teammates. The next day she attended an OA practice and spent two hours running through drills as the scout team.
“She busted her butt for us and then she goes back to Bentley and goes about her business,” said Clement-Holbrook. “I told my team then next day that was a very special moment - it was a gift for her to be so incredibly unselfish.”
That is what she has come to expect from her former star and, no matter what happens tonight in the national title game, Clement-Holbrook is proud of all that has already been accomplished and what Battista has become both on and off the court.
She said, “It’s nice to have the Gatorade Player of the Year, but there’s just so many qualities about her that her teammates would do anything just because of the way she treated them. She made her teammates better and that’s what made it work.”
“Above and beyond what you look for as an athlete - it’s character and she has both. I’m just so proud of her.”
Follow along with tonight’s action starting at 7 p.m. at www.ncaa.com/game/basketball-women/d2/2014/03/28/bentley-west-tex-am.
Josh Perry can be contacted at [email protected] and followed on Twitter at @Josh_Perry10.