EAST HADDAM – Five years ago, the Hale-Ray girls basketball team made the news when the Little Noises lost 101-35 to East Hampton.
The team, which had only six players and had struggled that season, opted not to play their Shoreline Conference opponent again during the regular season, forfeiting the game.
The next season, under a different coach, Hale-Ray went 0-20.
When current coach John Leavitt showed up in 2022, there weren’t many kids left who wanted to play and the ones who did were freshmen and sophomores. Then-athletic director Marty Ryzcek had scoured the halls the year before, looking for athletic girls who could play basketball, but nobody wanted to.
“Every single one said, ‘Nope, we’re not going to do that. It’s embarrassing. We don’t want to be embarrassed,’” Ryzcek said.
These days, nobody is embarrassed to be a member of the Hale-Ray team. The Little Noises have posted their best regular season record (16-4) in 24 years and are hosting a Shoreline Conference tournament game for the first time Wednesday night when the third-ranked Noises host Old Saybrook in the quarterfinals.
They are fifth in the Class S rankings behind two other Shoreline teams – Coginchaug and Morgan.
This is all new territory for the Little Noises, who last had a winning record in the regular season in 2001 (13-7).
“The first year, it was all about trying to make them feel included,” said Leavitt, a 1987 Hale-Ray graduate in his third year of coaching. “I wanted them to enjoy it. I didn’t want to lose anybody. Year two, I started to put the pressure on. They kicked back, then they were OK.
“I have five seniors this year- I told them ‘I can’t be easy, you won’t be as good as you can be,’ and they’ve allowed me to push them hard. It’s been amazing. It’s been a great run for us.”
Senior captains Nicole Sikorski and Mackenzie Purdell were freshmen the year the team won no games. They played varsity and JV games because they didn’t have enough players. Sikorski hurt her ankle in one JV game and they remembered they had to finish the game (which they won) with four players.
“That was kind of rough,” Sikorski said.
But they stuck with it.
“We found out we were getting a new coach so we wanted to keep going,” said Purdell, a 5-10 center who averages 12 points and 11 rebounds this season. “I played basketball my whole life. I wasn’t going to quit.”
“When we played in middle school, we were on teams where there were five or six of us total for the entire season,” Sikorski said. “We were used to it. We just wanted to keep going.”
There were some big losses Leavitt’s first year, but he had a freshman point guard he had to play because he had nobody else and he had no upperclassmen.
Still, the Little Noises won six games and advanced to the state tournament for the first time since 2012 (they lost in the first round). Last year, they won nine games and advanced to both the Shoreline and Class S state tournament, where they lost to East Catholic in the first round.
It also helped that junior Mia Pisciotti, who went to Mercy last year, returned to Hale-Ray and is now the team’s leading scorer, averaging 15 points per game.
“John has worked really hard to nurture the program,” said Ryczek, the retired athletic director who now serves as an assistant coach for the girls. “They were really hurting emotionally.
“A long time ago, I went to an All-State dinner and the speaker talked about the ‘cold pricklies’ and the ‘warm fuzzies.’ (Leavitt) was a ‘warm fuzzy’ clearly in his first year but last year we started doing some ‘cold pricklies.’ We talked to the kids about it. They understood the demands – when you get better, you have higher expectations, you can’t do what you’ve always done. It has to get tougher. He’s been good this year at being demanding. He can kick you in the butt and pat you on the back at the same time.”
The girls have embraced it.
“It’s a mindset shift,” Sikorski said. “At first, everybody was a little nervous about how the season was going to go.”
But once Hale-Ray won its first game, against Coginchaug, 47-43, the players believed.
“Everybody, the first time they played us, I think they were like, ‘Oh, it’s Hale-Ray, easy win,’” Purdell said.
“The Senior Night easy win type of thing,” Sikorski said.
This year, Hale-Ray beat East Hampton for the first time since the 101-point game, 48-41, on Jan. 17. The girls didn’t know about the infamous game in 2020 but there was a lot of talk about it in school.
“It was a big thing for our school,” Sikorski said. “It was a home game. Everybody came and watched.”
Now people know about them; the post-season is all new for the Noises, who haven’t won a state tournament game since 2004.
“This year, we’ve had a different attitude,” Purdell said. “We’ve been going hard every practice, every game.”